Again, though he thus anticipated the movements of the world, he did not, like the other poets, change his view about Nature, Man and God.  He conceived that view when he was young, and he did not alter it.  Hence, he did not follow or reflect from year to year the opinions of his time on these great matters.  When Paracelsus was published in 1835 Browning had fully thought out, and in that poem fully expressed, his theory of God’s relation to man, and of man’s relation to the universe around him, to his fellow men, and to the world beyond.  It was a theory which was original, if any theory can be so called.  At least, its form, as he expressed it, was clearly original.  Roughly sketched in Pauline, fully rounded in Paracelsus, it held and satisfied his mind till the day of his death.  But Tennyson had no clear theory about Man or Nature or God when he began, nor was he afterwards, save perhaps when he wrote the last stanzas of In Memoriam, a fully satisfied citizen of the city that has foundations.  He believed in that city, but he could not always live in it.  He grew into this or that opinion about the relations of God and man, and then grew out of it.  He held now this, now that view of nature, and of man in contact with nature.  There was always battle in his soul; although he won his brittle in the end, he had sixty years of war.  Browning was at peace, firm-fixed.  It is true the inward struggle of Tennyson enabled him to image from year to year his own time better than Browning did.  It is true this struggle enabled him to have great variety in his art-work when it was engaged with the emotions which belong to doubt and faith; but it also made him unable to give to his readers that sense of things which cannot be shaken, of faith in God and in humanity wholly independent, in its depths, of storms on the surface of this mortal life, which was one of Browning’s noblest legacies to that wavering, faithless, pessimistic, analysis-tormented world through which we have fought our way, and out of which we are emerging.

4.  The danger in art, or for an artist, of so settled a theory is that in expression it tends to monotony; and sometimes, when we find almost every poem of Browning’s running up into his theory, we arrive at the borders of the Land of Weary-men.  But he seems to have been aware of this danger, and to have conquered it.  He meets it by the immense variety of the subjects he chooses, and of the scenery in which he places them.  I do not think he ever repeats any one of his examples, though he always repeats his theory.  And the pleasant result is that we can either ignore the theory if we like, or rejoice over its universal application, or, beyond it altogether, be charmed and excited by the fresh examples alone.  And they are likely to charm, at least by variety, for they are taken from all ages of history; from as many diverse phases of human act, character and passion as there are poems which concern