But it is to France we must go for the surest authoritative note--that land of the Academy and correct taste which _hums_ and _hahs_ over its own Immortals in proverbially unpenetrating conclave. No less a man than Taine declares that Browning stands first among English poets--"the most excellent where excellence is greatness, the most gifted where genius is a common dower." While there can be no doubt that Browning outdid all the other great poets of his time in "azure feats," in developing an absolutely self-centered ideal of art, which is yet so true to the ultimate tendencies of the century, indeed to those of all time, for evolution and democracy are henceforth the torch-bearers of the human soul--each of the other half-dozen or so greatest poets had distinct and independent individualities which were more nearly the outcome of the current tendencies of the time than Browning's. [Illustration: ALFRED TENNYSON] Tennyson was equally familiar with the thought and much more familiar with the politics of the day, but there is an infinite difference in their attitude. Browning, if I may be excused for quoting one of Shakespeare's most abused phrases, rides over the century like a "naked new-born babe striding the blast." Tennyson ambles through it on a palfrey which has a tendency to flounder into every slough of despond it comes to. This may seem to be putting it rather too strongly, but is it not true? Browning has the vision belonging to the latest child of time. He never follows; he leads. With his eyes fixed upon a far-off future where man shall be _man_ at last, he faces every problem with the intrepidity of an Oedipus confronting the Sphynx. The mystery of its riddles has no terrors for him. It is given to him as to few others to see the ineffable beauty of life's mystery, the promise it holds out of eternal joy. While he frequently discourses upon the existence of evil, he never for a moment admits any doubt into his own utmost soul of the beneficent part evil is meant to play in the molding of human destinies. Mr. Santayana has called him a barbarous poet. In a certain sense he is, if to be born among the first on a new plane of psychic perception where of no account become the endless metaphysical meanderings of the intellect, which cry "proof, proof, where there can be no proof," is barbarous. It was doubtless largely owing to this power of vision reminding us again somewhat of the child's in Maeterlinck's "Les Aveugles" which kept Browning from tinkering in the half-measures of the political leaders of his time. His plane is not unlike that of his own Lazarus, about whom the Arab physician says: