It is in this way also that his dramatic genius includes the metaphysical.  The abstract, no less than the practical questions which shape themselves in his mind, are put before us in the thoughts and words, in the character and conduct of his men and women.  This does not mean that human experience solves for him all the questions which it can be made to state, or that everything he believes can be verified by it:  for in that case his mode of thought would be scientific, and not metaphysical; it simply means, that so much of abstract truth as cannot be given in a picture of human life, lies outside his philosophy of it.  He accepts this residue as the ultimate mystery of what must be called Divine Thought.  Thought or spirit is with him the ultimate fact of existence; the one thing about which it is vain to theorize, and which we can never get behind.  His gospel would begin, “In the beginning was the Thought;” and since he can only conceive this as self-conscious, his “Alpha and Omega” is a Divine intelligence from which all the ideas of the human intellect are derived, and which stamps them as true.  These religious conceptions are the meeting-ground of the dramatic and the metaphysical activity of his poetic genius.  The two are blended in the vision of a Supreme Being not to be invested with human emotions, but only to be reached through them.

To show that Mr. Browning is a metaphysical poet, is to show that he is not a metaphysical thinker, though he is a thinker whose thought is metaphysical so far as principle goes.  A metaphysical thinker is always in some way or other thinking about thought; and this is precisely what Mr. Browning has no occasion to do, because he takes its assumptions upon trust.  He is a constant analyst of secondary motives and judgments.  No modern freethinker could make a larger allowance for what is incidental, personal, and even material in them:  we shall see that all his practical philosophy is bound up with this fact.  But he has never questioned the origin of our primary or innate ideas, for he has, as I have said, never questioned their truth.  It is essential to bear in mind that Mr. Browning is a metaphysical poet, and not a metaphysical thinker, to do justice to the depth and originality of his creative power; for his imagination includes everything which at a given moment a human being can think or feel, and often finds itself, therefore, at some point to which other minds have reasoned their way.  The coincidence occurs most often with German lines of thought, and it has therefore been concluded that he has studied the works in which they are laid down, or has otherwise moved in the same track; the fact being that he has no bond of union with German philosophers, but the natural tendencies of his own mind.  It may be easily ascertained that he did not read their language until late in life; and if what I have said of his mental habits is true, it is equally certain that their methods have been more foreign to him still.