the ideal is actual wherever beauty dwells.  And there is the closest affinity between art and religion, as its history proves, from Job and Isaiah, Homer and Aeschylus, to our own poet; for both art and religion lift us, each in its own way, above one-sidedness and limitation, to the region of the universal.  The one draws God to man, brings perfection here, and reaches its highest form in the joyous life of Greece, where the natural world was clothed with almost supernatural beauty; the other lifts man to God, and finds this life good because it reflects and suggests the greater life that is to be.  Both poetry and religion are a reconciliation and a satisfaction; both lift man above the contradictions of limited existence, and place him in the region of peace—­where,

    “with an eye made quiet by the power
  Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
  He sees into the life of things."[A]

[Footnote A:  Tintern Abbey.]

In this sense, it will be always true of the poet, as it is of the religious man, that

    “the world,
  The beauty and the wonder and the power,
  The shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades,
  Changes, surprises,"[A]

[Footnote A:  Fra Lippo Lippi.]

lead him back to God, who made it all.

He is essentially a witness to the divine element in the world.

It is the rediscovery of this divine element, after its expulsion by the age of Deism and doubt, that has given to this century its poetic grandeur.  Unless we regard Burke as the herald of the new era, we may say that England first felt the breath of the returning spirit in the poems of Shelley and Wordsworth.

  “The One remains, the many change and pass;
    Heaven’s light for ever shines, earth’s shadows fly;
  Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
    Stains the white radiance of eternity,
    Until death tramples it to fragments."[B]

[Footnote B:  Adonais.]

“And I have felt,” says Wordsworth,

  “A presence that disturbs me with the joy
  Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
  Of something far more deeply interfused,
  Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
  And the round ocean and the living air,
  And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: 
  A motion and a spirit, that impels
  All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
  And rolls through all things."[C]

[Footnote C:  Tintern Abbey.]

Such notes as these could not be struck by Pope, nor be understood by the age of prose.  Still they are only the prelude of the fuller song of Browning.  Whether he be a greater poet than these or not,—­a question whose answer can benefit nothing, for each poet has his own worth, and reflects by his own facet the universal truth—­his poetry contains in it larger elements, and the promise of a deeper harmony from the harsher discords of his more stubborn material.  Even where their spheres touch, Browning held by the artistic truth in a different manner.  To Shelley, perhaps the most intensely spiritual of all our poets,