him is work of mere temporary and transitory utility.  He has no high inspirations such as support the men who change the face of the world.  The Divine Ruler who has given him his special faculties, who has enjoined upon him his special tasks, holds no further communication with him.  But he will do the work of a mere man in a man’s strength, such as it is; he cannot make new things; he can use the thing he finds; he can for a term of years “do the best with the least change possible”; he can turn to good account what is already half-made; and so, he believes, he can, in a sense, co-operate with God.  So long as he was an irresponsible dreamer, a mere voice in the air, it was permitted him to indulge in glorious dreams, to utter shining words.  Now that his feet are on the earth, now that his thoughts convert themselves into deeds, he must accept the limitations of earth.  The idealists may put forth this programme and that; his business is not with them but with the present needs of the humble mass of his people—­“men that have wives and women that have babes,” whose first demand is bread; by intelligence and sympathy he will effect “equal sustainment everywhere” throughout society; and when the man of genius who is to alter the world arises, such a man most of all will approve the work of his predecessor, who left him no mere “shine and shade” on which to operate, but the good hard substance of common human life.

All this is admirably put, and it is interesting to find that Browning, who had rejoiced with Herakles doing great deeds and purging the world of monsters, could also honour a poor provisional Atlas whose task of sustaining a poor imperfect globe upon his shoulders is less brilliant but not perhaps less useful.  Nor would it be just to overlook the fact that in three or four pages the poet asserts himself as more than the prudent casuist.  The splendid image of society as a temple from which winds the long procession of powers and beauties has in it something of the fine mysticism of Edmund Burke.[113] The record of the Prince’s early and irresponsible aspirations for a free Italy—­

    Ay, still my fragments wander, music-fraught,
    Sighs of the soul, mine once, mine now, and mine
    For ever!—­

with what immediately follows, would have satisfied the ardent spirit of Mrs Browning.[114] And the characterisation of the genius of the French nation, whose lust for war and the glory of war Browning censures as “the dry-rot of the race,” rises brilliantly out of its somewhat gray surroundings:—­

     The people here,
    Earth presses to her heart, nor owns a pride
    Above her pride i’ the race all flame and air
    And aspiration to the boundless Great,
    The incommensurably Beautiful—­
    Whose very faulterings groundward come of flight
    Urged by a pinion all too passionate
    For heaven and what it holds of gloom and glow: 
    Bravest of thinkers, bravest of the brave
    Doers, exalt in Science, rapturous
    In Art, the—­more than all—­magnetic race
    To fascinate their fellows, mould mankind.