For Browning the poet of Prometheus Unbound was not that beautiful and ineffectual angel of Matthew Arnold’s fancy, beating in the void his luminous wings.  A great moral purpose looked forth from Shelley’s work, as it does, Browning would add, from all lofty works of art.  And it may be remarked that the criticism of Browning’s own writings which considers not only their artistic methods and artistic success or failure, but also their ethical and spiritual purport, is entirely in accord with his thoughts in this essay.  Far from regarding Shelley as unpractical, he notes—­and with perfect justice—­“the peculiar practicalness” of Shelley’s mind, which in his earlier years acted injuriously upon both his conduct and his art.  His power to perceive the defects of society was accompanied by as precocious a fertility to contrive remedies; but his crudeness in theorising and his inexperience in practice resulted in not a few youthful errors.  Gradually he left behind him “this low practical dexterity”; gradually he learnt that “the best way of removing abuses is to stand fast by truth.  Truth is one, as they are manifold; and innumerable negative effects are produced by the upholding of one positive principle.”  Browning urges that Shelley, before the close, had passed from his doctrinaire atheism to what was virtually a theistic faith.  “I shall say what I think,” he adds—­“had Shelley lived he would have finally ranged himself with the Christians....  The preliminary step to following Christ is the leaving the dead to bury their dead.”  Perhaps this hypothetical anticipation is to be classed with the surmise of Cardinal Wiseman (if Father Prout rightly attributed to that eminent ecclesiastic a review of Men and Women in The Rambler) that Browning himself would one day be found in the ranks of converts to Catholicism.  In each case a wish was father to the thought; Browning recognised the fact that Shelley assigned a place to love, side by side with power, among the forces which determine the life and development of humanity, and with Browning himself “power” was a synonym for the Divine will, and “love” was often an equivalent for God manifest in Jesus Christ.  One or two other passages of the essay may be noted as illustrating certain characteristics of the writer’s modes of thought and feeling:  “Everywhere is apparent Shelley’s belief in the existence of Good, to which Evil is an accident”—­it is an optimist here, though of a subtler doctrine than Shelley’s, who is applauding optimism.  “Shelley was tender, though tenderness is not always the characteristic of very sincere natures; he was eminently both tender and sincere.”  Was Browning consulting his own heart, which was always sincere, and could be tender, but whose tenderness sometimes disappeared in explosions of indignant wrath?  The principle, again, by which he determined an artist’s rank is in harmony with Browning’s general feeling that men are to be judged less by their actual achievements