Ere suns and moons could wax and wane,
      Ere stars were thunder-girt, or piled
      The heavens, God thought on me his child;
    Ordained a life for me, arrayed
      Its circumstances every one
    To the minutest; ay, God said
      This head this hand should rest upon
      Thus, ere he fashioned star or sun. 
    And having thus created me,
      Thus rooted me, he bade me grow,
    Guiltless for ever, like a tree
      That buds and blooms, nor seeks to know
      The law by which it prospers so: 
    But sure that thought and word and deed
      All go to swell his love for me,
    Me, made because that love had need
      Of something irreversibly
      Pledged solely its content to be.

As to A Grammarian’s Funeral, that poem also belongs to the German rather than to the Italian spirit.  The Renaissance in Italy lost its religion; at the same time, in Germany, it added a reformation of religion to the New Learning.  The Renaissance in Italy desired the fulness of knowledge in this world, and did not look for its infinities in the world beyond.  In Germany the same desire made men call for the infinities of knowledge beyond the earth.  A few Italians, like Savonarola, like M. Angelo, did the same, and failed to redeem their world; but eternal aspiration dwelt in the soul of every German who had gained a religion.  In Italy, as the Renaissance rose to its luxury and trended to its decay, the pull towards personal righteousness made by belief in an omnipotent goodness who demands the subjection of our will to his, ceased to be felt by artists, scholars and cultivated society.  A man’s will was his only law.  On the other hand, the life of the New Learning in Germany and England was weighted with a sense of duty to an eternal Righteousness.  The love of knowledge or beauty was modified into seriousness of life, carried beyond this life in thought, kept clean, and, though filled with incessant labour on the earth, aspired to reach its fruition only in the life to come.

This is the spirit and the atmosphere of the Grammarian’s Funeral, and Browning’s little note at the beginning says that its time “was shortly after the revival of learning in Europe.”  I have really no proof that Browning laid the scene of his poem in Germany, save perhaps the use of such words as “thorp” and “croft,” but there is a clean, pure morning light playing through the verse, a fresh, health-breathing northern air, which does not fit in with Italy; a joyous, buoyant youthfulness in the song and march of the students who carry their master with gay strength up the mountain to the very top, all of them filled with his aspiring spirit, all of them looking forward with gladness and vigour to life—­which has no relation whatever to the temper of Florentine or Roman life during the age of the Medici.  The bold brightness, moral earnestness, pursuit of the ideal, spiritual intensity,