this return has put many in tune with him who would not have been so twenty years ago. As regards the poet, this fact is as characteristic of his mind and genius as it is of his mode of thought. As regards his readers, it is in good measure the principle of that correspondence of conviction and emotion which makes both the man and his work so attractive to them. The strength, balance, and fulness of his nature, the spiritual scope of his mind, are tested and disclosed by his position and relation here.

It has often been a question with his readers in what relation Browning stood to the course of the higher thought in his time—to that great discussion always proceeding, never complete, which affects the grounds of all thought, and how he was affected by the discussion. Nor has the answer to the question, when put and tried by reference to his works, seemed clear or certain. Browning has spent a long life in a century much and deeply moved by debate of great questions. There have been great changes in many minds and much movement of the mind of the age in his lifetime; and he has taken deep interest in the questions and their discussion, but scarcely, so far as appears, an interest that can be called personal. The debate does not seem to have really affected his greater convictions, or to have disturbed his central position. His principles, broad and deeply placed, almost from the days of "Sordello," have remained the same. A man of strong nature and strong intellect, he has shown a marked independence, and has occupied a significant

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position amid the controversies of his time. great points only of its debate appear in his work. The many doubts of Clough, the spiritual forlornness of Arnold, the scepticism of a dozen writers and singers, his work is clear of these-above, it may be, but somehow remote; while at the same time he has shown, from "Paracelsus" onwards, a clear grasp and deep interest in whatever is general and permanent in the efforts men have made to harmonize experience and belief. He has kept throughout a sure and sound sympathy with essential things. Many writers who spoke to the earlier years of his time, and who were more heard then than he was, have less pertinence now, because they have a narrower hold on life, and the modes of thought they expressed and emphasized have more or less faded into that past which so soon comes for all that is partial; while Browning, with his freer and stronger touch both of the doubts and the beliefs, of the hopes and fears, that do not pass away, but stay with the heart of man because their sources are always present in man's life, is more heard and better understood now than he was then.

The same breadth and hold upon essential things which Browning has thus shown in regard to less important controversies he has shown in regard to the grand controversy of our century-that controversy above described as between the realism of physical science and the idealism of faith, imagination, and philosophy. The present, we have said, may be described as an age of science tending to a deeper

thought of things, and seeking a larger interpretation of experience. Our higher poetry, to be adequate, must unite the tendencies and combine the principles of both. It is peculiarly distinctive of Browning that he combines and harmonizes those principles. He has the scientific interest, the critical observant temper and power of eye and mind, the love of facts, the respect for experience, the perfectly free search after truth which mark the faculty and make the virtues on which we have set such value of late; and his work has those qualities and interests so strongly marked that many of its readers have been drawn to it by these powers, and are only aware of these. His habit is not to pass over facts or refine or dream them away, but most distinctly to see and grasp and interpret them within his scope. He seeks the world of facts and events, the world of men; but it is not to remain and rest there. He seeks a way through the world of facts and experience, frankly and entirely faced and accepted, to an order and a world beyond-the world of the mind and heart at their best. From Plato he learned (cf. "Pauline") the reality of "the world of ideas." By the vivid energy of his own mind he has maintained his sense of that "unseen universe." But his way of reaching and making solid to himself whatever may be known or guessed of that "ideal world" is through the facts of man's mind, and the facts of experience exactly known. He has no belief in any simple intuition of thinker or poet. As against such thinking, and as against all vague abstractions, he is

scientific, inductive if you will. His humour is realistic; his dramatic method is personal, particular. In a phrase he himself uses, he is at once objective and subjective, and both intensely.

But this analysis of the poet's mind and art, apt to remain vague standing by itself, might be made more definite, and the relation of his work and thought to the great questions above indicated be made clearer, by comparison of the principles and method of certain other minds of his time with his. To take only one—and one comparison of whom with Browning may at first surprise-Herbert Spencer. Spencer is one of the ablest and most comprehensive thinkers of our time, one of the most comprehensive of English thinkers. He for this reason represents effectively and exhaustively some of the principles and tendencies of the age better than any other writer. Now, what is his philosophy, and whence comes its significance? It is mainly an elaborate and ingenious construction of things on the basis and by the means of physical science. Spencer, better than any other, exemplifies the immense stimulus physics has given to the modern mind-the immense and absorbing impression made by this knowledge on the modern mind. But though this is obvious at every point of his writings, Spencer knows, if Comte did not, that this cannot be the whole of philosophy. He is aware of the great part played in the course of human thought by the metaphysical and spiritual view of things. He knows that such "views," per

sisting through some of the best minds, must in some sense and at some points really rest on the mind; and he knows that no system of thought can stand which does not regard experience in its whole extent, and interpret the full consciousness of man. So he seeks a reconciliation of physics and metaphysics, of realism and idealism, and this reconciliation he entitles by one of his suggestive phrases-" transfigured realism." Now, there can be no doubt that this necessity, old as the birth of all genuine thought, was never so necessary as now, whether in the province of thought, in the sphere of belief, or in the very spirit of life itself. Does Mr. Spencer, then, accomplish the transfiguration? Are the worlds of thought and reality reconciled by him? Surely not; for what he offers as such reconciliation comes only to this, after all-an interpretation of consciousness from the standpoint and in the terms of physics, with a substratum of Unknowable Force as the ultimate spring and explanation of all phenomena of mind and matter. And so neither at the point where the phrase quoted is used to describe what we seek, nor at other critical points, is the reconciliation of realism and idealism, of science and philosophy, achieved by this excellent and valorous thinker. He fails to account for or to place the distinctive elements of self-consciousness; he misconceives the evolution and significance of thought; he leaves matter and mind, nature and thought, over against each other without vital relation, without explanation, and with