In this complicated movement Browning played a very notable and memorable part.  But it was one of which the first generation of his readers was entirely, and he himself to a great extent, unconscious, and which his own language often disguises or conceals.  Of all the poets of the century he had the clearest and most confident vision of the working of God in the world, the most buoyant faith in the divine origin and destiny of man.  Half his poetry is an effort to express, in endless variety of iteration, the nearness of God, to unravel the tangled circumstance of human life, and disclose everywhere infinity enmeshed amid the intricacies of the finite.

On the side of Nature his interest was less keen and his vision less subtle.  His “visitations of the living God” came to him by other avenues than those opened by Wordsworth’s ecstatic gaze, “in love and holy passion,” upon outward beauty.  Only limited classes of natural phenomena appealed to him powerfully at all, the swift and sudden upheavals and catastrophes, the ardours and accesses, the silence that thrills with foreboding and suspense.  For continuities, both of the mechanical and the organic kind, he lacked sense.  We have seen how his eye fastened everywhere upon the aspects of life least suggestive of either iron uniformity or harmonious evolution.  The abrupt demarcations which he everywhere imposes or discovers were the symptom of a primitive ingrained atomism of thought which all the synthetic strivings of a God-intoxicated intellect could not entirely overcome.

II.

His metaphysical thinking thus became an effort to reconcile an all-embracing synthesis with a sense of individuality as stubborn and acute as ever man had.  Body and Soul, Nature and Spirit, Man and God, Good and Evil, he presented now as co-operative or alien, now as hostile antagonists or antitheses.  That their opposition is not ultimate, that evil is at bottom a form of good, and all finite existence a passing mode of absolute being, was a conviction towards which his thought on one side constantly strove, which it occasionally touched, but in which it could not securely rest.  Possessed by the thirst for absoluteness, he vindicated the “infinity” of God and the soul by banishing all the “finiteness” of sense into a limbo of illusion.  The infinite soul, imprisoned for life in a body which at every moment clogs its motion and dims its gaze, fights its way through the shows of sense,[124] “which ever proving false still promise to be true,” until death opens the prison-gate and restores the captive to its infinity.  Sorrow and evil were stains imposed by Time upon the white radiance of an eternal being; and Browning sometimes rose, though with a less sure step, to the dizzier height of holding Time itself to be unreal, and the soul’s earthly life not an episode in an endless sequence, but a dream of progressive change imposed upon a changeless and timeless essence.