Where the one saw, the other was blind.  To the one there was the misery and the universal mirk; to the other, the pure white beam was scarcely broken.  Carlyle believed in the good, beyond all doubt:  he fought his great battle in its strength and won, but “he was sorely wounded.”  Emerson was Sir Galahad, blind to all but the Holy Grail, his armour spotless-white, his virtue cloistered and unbreathed, his race won without the dust and heat.  But his optimism was too easy to be satisfactory.  His victory was not won in the enemy’s citadel, where sin sits throned amidst the chaos, but in the placid upper air of poetic imagination.  And, in consequence, Emerson can only convince the converted; and his song is not heard in the dark, nor does it cheer the wayfarer on the muddy highway, along which burthened humanity meanly toils.

But Browning’s optimism is more earnest and real than any pious hope, or dogmatic belief, or benevolent theory held by a placid philosopher, protected against contact with the sins and sorrows of man as by an invisible garment of contemplative holiness.  It is a conviction which has sustained shocks of criticism and the test of facts; and it therefore, both for the poet and his readers, fulfils a mission beyond the reach of any easy trust in a mystic good.  Its power will be felt and its value recognized by those who have themselves confronted the contradictions of human life and known their depths.

No lover of Browning’s poetry can miss the vigorous manliness of the poet’s own bearing, or fail to recognize the strength that flows from his joyous, fearless personality, and the might of his intellect and heart.  “When British literature,” said Carlyle of Scott and Cobbett, “lay all puking and sprawling in Wertherism, Byronism and other Sentimentalisms, nature was kind enough to send us two healthy men.”  And he breaks out into a eulogy of mere health, of “the just balance of faculties that radiates a glad light outwards, enlightening and embellishing all things.”  But he finds it easy to account for the health of these men:  they had never faced the mystery of existence.  Such healthiness we find in Browning, although he wrote with Carlyle at his side, and within earshot of the infinite wail of this moral fatalist.  And yet, the word health is inadequate to convey the depth of the joyous meaning which the poet found in the world.  His optimism was not a constitutional and irreflective hopefulness, to be accounted for on the ground that “the great mystery of existence was not great to him:  did not drive him into rocky solitudes to wrestle with it for an answer, to be answered or to perish.”  There are, indeed, certain rash and foolish persons who pretend to trace Browning’s optimism to his mixed descent; but there is a “pause in the leading and the light” of those wiseacres, who pretend to trace moral and mental characteristics to physiological antecedents.  They cannot quite catch a great man in the making,