Germany, not Italy, is, I think, the country in which Browning intended to place two other poems which belong to the time of the Renaissance—­Johannes Agricola in Meditation and A Grammarian’s Funeral.  Their note is as different from that of the Italian poems as the national temper of Germany is from that of Italy.  They have no sense of beauty for beauty’s sake alone.  Their atmosphere is not soft or gay but somewhat stern.  The logical arrangement of them is less one of feeling than of thought.  There is a stronger manhood in them, a grimmer view of life.  The sense of duty to God and Man, but little represented in the Italian poems of the Renaissance, does exist in these two German poems.  Moreover, there is in them a full representation of aspiration to the world beyond.  But the Italian Renaissance lived for the earth alone, and its loveliness; too close to earth to care for heaven.

It pleased Browning to throw himself fully into the soul of Johannes Agricola; and he does it with so much personal fervour that it seems as if, in one of his incarnations, he had been the man, and, for the moment of his writing, was dominated by him.  The mystic-passion fills the poetry with keen and dazzling light, and it is worth while, from this point of view, to compare the poem with Tennyson’s Sir Galahad, and on another side, with St. Simeon Stylites.

Johannes Agricola was one of the products of the reforming spirit of the sixteenth century in Germany, one of its wild extremes.  He believes that God had chosen him among a few to be his for ever and for his own glory from the foundation of the world.  He did not say that all sin was permitted to the saints, that what the flesh did was no matter, like those wild fanatics, one of whom Scott draws in Woodstock; but he did say, that if he sinned it made no matter to his election by God.  Nay, the immanence of God in him turned the poison to health, the filth to jewels.  Goodness and badness make no matter; God’s choice is all.  The martyr for truth, the righteous man whose life has saved the world, but who is not elected, is damned for ever in burning hell.  “I am eternally chosen; for that I praise God.  I do not understand it.  If I did, could I praise Him?  But I know my settled place in the divine decrees.”  I quote the beginning.  It is pregnant with superb spiritual audacity, and kindled with imaginative pride.

    There’s heaven above, and night by night
      I look right through its gorgeous roof;
    No suns and moons though e’er so bright
      Avail to stop me; splendour-proof
      Keep the broods of stars aloof: 
    For I intend to get to God,
      For ’tis to God I speed so fast,
    For in God’s breast, my own abode,
      Those shoals of dazzling glory, passed,
      I lay my spirit down at last. 
    I lie where I have always lain,
      God smiles as he has always smiled;