The finer influence of Shelley upon the genius of Browning in his youth proceeded from something quite other than those doctrinaire abstractions—­the formulas of revolution—­which Shelley had caught up from Godwin and certain French thinkers of the eighteenth century.  Browning’s spirit from first to last was one which was constantly reaching upward through the attainments of earth to something that lay beyond them.  A climbing spirit, such as his, seemed to perceive in Shelley a spirit that not only climbed but soared.  He could in those early days have addressed to Shelley words written later, and suggested, one cannot but believe, by his feeling for his wife: 

    You must be just before, in fine,
    See and make me see, for your part,
    New depths of the Divine!

Shelley opened up for his young and enthusiastic follower new vistas leading towards the infinite, towards the unattainable Best.  Browning’s only piece of prose criticism—­apart from scattered comments in his letters—­is the essay introductory to that volume of letters erroneously ascribed to Shelley, which was published when Browning was but little under forty years old.  It expresses his mature feelings and convictions; and these doubtless contain within them as their germ the experience of his youth.[11] Shelley appears to him as a poet gifted with a fuller perception of nature and man than that of the average mind, and striving to embody the thing he perceives “not so much with reference to the many below, as to the One above him, the supreme Intelligence which apprehends all things in their absolute truth—­an ultimate view ever aspired to, if but partially attained, by the poet’s own soul.”  If Shelley was deficient in some subordinate powers which support and reinforce the purely poetic gifts, he possessed the highest faculty and in this he lived and had his being.  “His spirit invariably saw and spoke from the last height to which it had attained.”  What was “his noblest and predominating characteristic” as a poet?  Browning attempts to give it definition:  it was “his simultaneous perception of Power and Love in the absolute, and of Beauty and Good in the concrete, while he throws, from his poet’s station between both, swifter, subtler, and more numerous films for the connexion of each with each, than have been thrown by any modern artificer of whom I have knowledge.”  In other words it was Shelley’s special function to fling an aerial bridge from reality, as we commonly understand that word, to the higher reality which we name the ideal; to set up an aerial ladder—­not less solid because it is aerial—­upon the earth, whose top reached to heaven.  Such was Browning’s conception of Shelley, and it pays little regard either to atheistic theory or vegetarian practice.