be called a new idea disturbed his outline sketch of the universe.  He lived afterwards only to fill it in, showing with ever greater detail the relations of man to man in history, and emphasizing with greater grimness the war of good and evil in human action.  There is evidence, it is true, that the formulae from which he more or less consciously set forth, ultimately proved too narrow for him, and we find him beating himself in vain against their limitations; still, on the whole, Carlyle speculated within the range and influence of principles adopted early in life, and never abandoned for higher or richer ideas, or substantially changed.

In these respects, there is considerable resemblance between Carlyle and Browning.  Browning, indeed, fixed his point of view and chose his battleground still earlier; and he held it resolutely to his life’s close.  In his Pauline and in his Epilogue to Asolando we catch the triumphant tone of a single idea, which, during all the long interval, had never sunk into silence.  Like

  “The wise thrush, he sings each song twice over,
  Lest you should think he never could recapture
  The first fine careless rapture!"[A]

[Footnote A:  Home Thoughts from Abroad.]

Moreover, these two poets, if I may be permitted to call Carlyle a poet, taught the same truth.  They were both witnesses to the presence of God in the spirit of man, and looked at this life in the light of another and a higher; or rather, they penetrated through the husk of time and saw that eternity is even here, a tranquil element underlying the noisy antagonisms of man’s earthly life.  Both of them, like Plato’s philosopher, made their home in the sunlight of ideal truth:  they were not denizens of the cave taking the things of sense for those of thought, shadows for realities, echoes for the voices of men.

But, while Carlyle fought his way into this region, Browning found himself in it from the first; while Carlyle bought his freedom with a great sum, the poet “was free born.”  Carlyle saw the old world faith break up around him, and its fragments never ceased to embarrass his path.  He was at the point of transition, present at the collision of the old and new, and in the midst of the confusion.  He, more than any other English writer, was the instrument of the change from the Deism of the eighteenth century and the despair which followed it, into the larger faith of our own.  But, for Browning, there was a new heaven and a new earth, and old things had passed away.  This notable contrast between the two men, arising at once from their disposition and their moral environment, had far-reaching effects on their lives and their writings.  But their affinity was deeper than the difference, for they are essentially heirs and exponents of the same movement in English thought.