itself in a spiked cypress or a jagged mountain cleft.  A placid soul without “incidents” arrests him less surely than the fireflies on a mossy bank.  Hence, while “the finite” always appears, when explicitly contrasted with “the infinite,” as the inferior,—­as something soi-disant imperfect and incomplete,—­its actual status and function in Browning’s imaginative world rather resembles that of Plato’s peras in relation to the apeiron,—­the saving “limit” which gives definite existence to the limitless vague.

II.

Hence Browning, while a romantic in temper, was, in comparison with his predecessors, a thorough realist in method.  All the Romantic poets of the previous generation had refused and decried some large portion of reality.  Wordsworth had averted his ken from half of human fate; Keats and Shelley turned from the forlornness of human society as it was to the transfigured humanity of myth.  All three were out of sympathy with civilisation; and their revolt went much deeper than a distaste for the types of men it bred.  They attacked a triumphant age of reason in its central fastness, the brilliant analytic intelligence to which its triumphs were apparently due.  Keats declaimed at cold philosophy which undid the rainbow’s spells; Shelley repelled the claim of mere understanding to settle the merits of poetry; Wordsworth, the profoundest, though by no means the most cogent or connected, thinker of the three, denounced the “meddling intellect” which murders to dissect, and strove to strip language itself of every element of logic and fancy, as distortions of the truth, only to be uttered in the barest words, which comes to the heart that watches and receives.  On all these issues Browning stands in sharp, if not quite absolute, contrast.  “Barbarian,” as he has been called, and as in a quite intelligible sense he was, he found his poetry pre-eminently among the pursuits, the passions, the interests and problems, of civilised men.  His potent gift of imagination never tempted him, during his creative years, to assail the sufficiency of intellect, or to disparage the intellectual and “artificial” elements of speech; on the contrary, he appears from the outset employing in the service of poetry a discursive logic of unsurpassed swiftness and dexterity, and a vast heterogeneous army of words gathered, like a sudden levy, with a sole eye to their effective force, from every corner of civilised life, and wearing the motley of the most prosaic occupations.  It was only in the closing years that he began to distrust the power of thought to get a grip upon reality.  His delight in poetic argument is often doubtless that of the ironical casuist, looking on at the self-deceptions of a soul; but his interest in ideas was a rooted passion that gave a thoroughly new, and to many readers most unwelcome, “intellectuality” to the whole manner as well as substance of his poetic work.