“Above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark
  Soars up and up, shivering for very joy;
  Afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing gulls
  Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe
  Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek
  Their loves in wood and plain—­and God renews
  His ancient rapture.  Thus He dwells in all,
  From life’s minute beginnings, up at last
  To man—­the consummation of this scheme
  Of being, the completion of this sphere of life."[A]

[Footnote A:  Paracelsus.]

Such passages as these contain neither the rapt, reflective calm of Wordsworth’s solemn tones, nor the ethereal intoxication of Shelley’s spirit-music; but there is in them the same consciousness of the infinite meaning of natural facts.  And beyond this, there is also, in the closing lines, a hint of a new region for art.  Shelley and Wordsworth were the poets of Nature, as all truly say; Browning was the poet of the human soul.  For Shelley, the beauty in which all things work and move was well-nigh “quenched by the eclipsing curse of the birth of man”; and Wordsworth lived beneath the habitual sway of fountains, meadows, hills and groves, while he kept grave watch o’er man’s mortality, and saw the shades of the prison-house gather round him.  From the life of man they garnered nought but mad indignation, or mellowed sadness.  It was a foolish and furious strife with unknown powers fought in the dark, from which the poet kept aloof, for he could not see that God dwelt amidst the chaos.  But Browning found “harmony in immortal souls, spite of the muddy vesture of decay.”  He found nature crowned in man, though man was mean and miserable.  At the heart of the most wretched abortion of wickedness there was the mark of the loving touch of God.  Shelley turned away from man; Wordsworth paid him rare visits, like those of a being from a strange world, made wise and sad with looking at him from afar; Browning dwelt with him.  He was a comrade in the fight, and ever in the van of man’s endeavour bidding him be of good cheer.  He was a witness for God in the midmost dark, where meet in deathless struggle the elemental powers of right and wrong.  For God is present for him, not only in the order and beauty of nature, but in the world of will and thought.  Beneath the caprice and wilful lawlessness of individual action, he saw a beneficent purpose which cannot fail, but “has its way with man, not he with it.”

Now this was a new world for poetry to enter into; a new depth to penetrate with hope; and Browning was the first of modern poets to

“Stoop
Into the vast and unexplored abyss,
Strenuously beating
The silent boundless regions of the sky.”

It is also a new world for religion and morality; and to understand it demands a deeper insight into the fundamental elements of human life.