For Browning not only represented this discordant, varied hurly-burly of life, but also, out of all the discords which he described, and which, when he chose, even his rhythms and word-arrangements realised in sound, he drew a concordant melody at last, and gave to a world, troubled with itself, the hope of a great concent into which all the discords ran, and where they were resolved.  And this hope for the individual and the race was one of the deepest elements in Browning’s religion.  It was also the hope of Tennyson, but Tennyson was often uncertain of it, and bewailed the uncertainty.  Browning was certain of his hope, and for the most part resolved his discords.  Even when he did not resolve them, he firmly believed that they would be resolved.  This, his essential difference from the other poets of the last fifty years, marks not only his apartness from the self-ignorance of English society, and the self-sceptical scepticism which arises from that self-ignorance, but also how steadily assured was the foundation of his spiritual life.  In the midst of the shifting storms of doubt and trouble, of mockery, contradiction, and assertion on religious matters, he stood unremoved.  Whatever men may think of his faith and his certainties, they reveal the strength of his character, the enduring courage of his soul, and the inspiring joyousness that, born of his strength, characterised him to the last poem he wrote.  While the other poets were tossing on the sea of unresolved Question, he rested, musing and creating, on a green island whose rocks were rooted on the ocean-bed, and wondered, with the smiling tolerance of his life-long charity, how his fellows were of so little faith, and why the sceptics made so much noise.  He would have reversed the Psalmist’s cry.  He would have said, “Thou art not cast down, O my soul; thou art not disquieted within me.  Thou hast hoped in God, who is the light of thy countenance, and thy God.”

At first the world, enamoured of its own complex discords, and pleased, like boys in the street, with the alarms it made, only cared for that part of Browning which represented the tangle and the clash, and ignored his final melody.  But of late it has begun, tired of the restless clatter of intellectual atoms, to desire to hear, if possible, the majestic harmonies in which the discords are resolved.  And at this point many at present and many more in the future will find their poetic and religious satisfaction in Browning.  At the very end, then, of the nineteenth century, in a movement which had only just begun, men said to themselves, “Browning felt beforehand what we are beginning to hope for, and wrote of it fifty, even sixty years ago.  No one cared then for him, but we care now.”