The same kind of work was done for phases and periods of the arts from Greek times to the Renaissance, I may even say, from the Renaissance to the present day. Balaustion’s Prologue concentrates the passage of dramatic poetry from Sophocles to Euripides. Aristophanes’ Apology realises the wild licence in which art and freedom died in Athens—­their greatness in their ruin—­and the passionate sorrow of those who loved what had been so beautiful. Cleon takes us into a later time when men had ceased to be original, and life and art had become darkened by the pain of the soul.  We pass on to two different periods of the Renaissance in Fra Lippo Lippi and in Andrea del Sarto, and are carried further through the centuries of art when we read Abt Vogler and A Toccata of Galuppi’s.  Each of these poems is a concentrated, accurate piece of art-history, with the addition to it of the human soul.

Periods and phases of religious history are equally realised. Caliban upon Setebos begins the record—­that philosophic savage who makes his God out of himself.  Then follows study after study, from A Death in the Desert to Bishop Blougram’s Apology.  Some carry us from early Christianity through the mediaeval faith; others lead us through the Paganism of the Renaissance and strange shows of Judaism to Browning’s own conception of religion in the present day contrasted with those of the popular religion in Christmas-Day and Easter-Day.

Never, in poetry, was the desire of the historical critic for accuracy of fact and portraiture, combined with vivid presentation of life, so fully satisfied.  No wonder Browning was not read of old; but it is no wonder, when the new History was made, when he was once found out, that he passed from a few to a multitude of readers.

6.  Another contrast appears at the very beginning of their career.  Tennyson, in his two earliest books in 1830 and 1833, though clearly original in some poems, had clinging round his singing robes some of the rags of the past.  He wrote partly in the weak and sentimental strain of the poets between 1822 and 1832.  Browning, on the contrary, sprang at once into an original poetic life of his own. Pauline was unfinished, irregular in form, harsh, abrupt, and overloaded, but it was also entirely fresh and distinct.  The influence of Shelley echoes in it, but much more in admiration than in imitation of him.  The matter, the spirit of the poem were his own, and the verse-movement was his own.  Had Browning been an imitator, the first thing he would have imitated would have been the sweet and rippling movement of Shelley’s melodies.  But the form of his verse, such as it was, arose directly out of his own nature and was as original as his matter.  Tennyson grew into originality, Browning leaped into it; born, not of other poets, but of his own will.  He begat himself.  It had been better for his art, so far as technical excellence is concerned, had he studied and imitated at first the previous masters.  But he did not; and his dominant individuality, whole in itself and creating its own powers, separates him at the very beginning from Tennyson.