In Bishop Blougram it condenses into wit.  The poem has a well-bred irony; in A Soul’s Tragedy irony smiles and stings; in Mr. Sludge, the Medium, it stabs with a thirsty point.  In Caliban upon Setebos we have the pure grotesque, an essentially noble variety of art, admitting of the utmost refinement of workmanship.  The Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister attains a new effect of grotesque:  it is the comic tragedy of vituperative malevolence. Holy-Cross Day heightens the grotesque with pity, indignation and solemnity:  The Heretic’s Tragedy raises it to sublimity.  Browning’s satire is equally keen and kindly.  It never condescends to raise laughter at infirmity, or at mere absurdities of manners; it respects human nature, but it convicts falsity by the revealing intensity of its illumination.  Of cynicism, of the wit that preys upon carrion, there is less than nothing.

Of all poets Browning is the healthiest and manliest; he is one of the “substantial men” of whom Landor speaks.  His genius is robust with vigorous blood, and his tone has the cheeriness of intellectual health.  The most subtle of minds, his is the least sickly.  The wind that blows in his pages is no hot and languorous breeze, laden with scents and sweets, but a fresh salt wind blowing in from the sea.  His poetry is a tonic; it braces and invigorates. “Il fait vivre ses phrases:”  his verse lives and throbs with life.  He is incomparably plentiful of vital heat; “so thoroughly and delightfully alive.”  This is an effect of art, and a moral impression.  It brings us into his own presence, and stirs us with an answering warmth of life in the breathing pages.  The keynote of his philosophy is:—­

      “God’s in his heaven,
      All’s right with the world!”

He has such a hopefulness of belief in human nature that he shrinks from no man, however clothed and cloaked in evil, however miry with stumblings and fallings.  I am a man, he might say with the noblest utterance of antiquity, and I deem nothing alien that is human.  His investigations of evil are profoundly consistent with an indomitable optimism.  Any one can say “All’s right with the world,” when he looks at the smiling face of things, at comfortable prosperity and a decent morality.  But the test of optimism is its sight of evil.  Browning has fathomed it, and he can still hope, for he sees the reflection of the sun in the depths of every foul puddle.  This vivid hope and trust in man is bound up with a strong and strenuous faith in God.  Browning’s Christianity is wider than our creeds, and is all the more vitally Christian in that it never sinks into pietism.  He is never didactic, but his faith is the root of his art, and transforms and transfigures it.  Yet as a dramatic poet he is so impartial, and can express all creeds with so easy an interpretative accent, that it is possible to prove him (as Shakespeare has been proved) a believer in every thing and a disbeliever in anything.