When Browning’s enormous influence upon the spiritual and mental life of our day—­an influence ever shaping itself to wise and beautiful issues—­shall have lost much of its immediate import, there will still surely be discerned in his work a formative energy whose resultant is pure poetic gain.  It is as the poet he will live:  not merely as the “novel thinker in verse.”  Logically, his attitude as ‘thinker’ is unimpressive.  It is the attitude, as I think some one has pointed out, of acquiescence with codified morality.  In one of his Causeries, the keen French critic quoted above has a remark upon the great Bossuet, which may with singular aptness be repeated of Browning:—­“His is the Hebrew genius extended, fecundated by Christianity, and open to all the acquisitions of the understanding, but retaining some degree of sovereign interdiction, and closing its vast horizon precisely where its light ceases.”  Browning cannot, or will not, face the problem of the future except from the basis of assured continuity of individual existence.  He is so much in love with life, for life’s sake, that he cannot even credit the possibility of incontinuity; his assurance of eternity in another world is at least in part due to his despair at not being eternal in this.  He is so sure, that the intellectually scrupulous detect the odours of hypotheses amid the sweet savour of indestructible assurance.  Schopenhauer says, in one of those recently-found Annotations of his which are so characteristic and so acute, “that which is called ‘mathematical certainty’ is the cane of a blind man without a dog, or equilibrium in darkness.”  Browning would sometimes have us accept the evidence of his ‘cane’ as all-sufficient.  He does not entrench himself among conventions:  for he already finds himself within the fortified lines of convention, and remains there.  Thus is true what Mr. Mortimer says in a recent admirable critique—­“His position in regard to the thought of the age is paradoxical, if not inconsistent.  He is in advance of it in every respect but one, the most important of all, the matter of fundamental principles; in these he is behind it.  His processes of thought are often scientific in their precision of analysis; the sudden conclusion which he imposes upon them is transcendental and inept.”  Browning’s conclusions, which harmonise so well with our haphazard previsionings, are sometimes so disastrously facile that they exercise an insurrectionary influence.  They occasionally suggest that wisdom of Gotham which is ever ready to postulate the certainty of a fulfilment because of the existence of a desire.  It is this that vitiates so much of his poetic reasoning.  Truth may ring regnant in the lines of Abt Vogler—­

     “And what is our failure here but a triumph’s evidence
      For the fulness of the days?”—­

but, unfortunately, the conclusion is, in itself, illogical.