So, for myself, let me summarise what I have already written in several sections of this book, and particularly in the closing pages of Chapter VI. There, it will be remembered--after having found that Browning's highest achievement is in his second period--emphasis was laid on the primary importance of his life-work in its having compelled us to the assumption of a fresh critical standpoint involving the construction of a new definition. In the light of this new definition I think Browning will ultimately be judged. As the sculptor in "Pippa Passes" was the predestinated novel thinker in marble, so Browning himself appears as the predestinated novel thinker in verse; the novel thinker, however, in degree, not in kind. But I do not for a moment believe that his greatness is in his status as a thinker: even less, that the poet and the thinker are indissociable. Many years ago Sainte-Beuve destroyed this shallow artifice of pseudo-criticism: "Venir nous dire que tout poëte de talent est, par essence, un grand _penseur_, et que tout vrai _penseur_ est nécessairement artiste et poëte, c'est une prétention insoutenable et que dément à chaque instant la réalité." When Browning's enormous influence upon the spiritual and mental life of our day--an influence ever shaping itself to wise and beautiful issues--shall have lost much of its immediate import, there will still surely be discerned in his work a formative energy whose resultant is pure poetic gain. It is as the poet he will live: not merely as the "novel thinker in verse." Logically, his attitude as 'thinker' is unimpressive. It is the attitude, as I think some one has pointed out, of acquiescence with codified morality. In one of his _Causeries_, the keen French critic quoted above has a remark upon the great Bossuet, which may with singular aptness be repeated of Browning:--"His is the Hebrew genius extended, fecundated by Christianity, and open to all the acquisitions of the understanding, but retaining some degree of sovereign interdiction, and closing its vast horizon precisely where its light ceases." Browning cannot, or will not, face the problem of the future except from the basis of assured continuity of individual existence. He is so much in love with life, for life's sake, that he cannot even credit the possibility of incontinuity; his assurance of eternity in another world is at least in part due to his despair at not being eternal in this. He is so sure, that the intellectually scrupulous detect the odours of hypotheses amid the sweet savour of indestructible assurance. Schopenhauer says, in one of those recently-found Annotations of his which are so characteristic and so acute, "that which is called 'mathematical certainty' is the cane of a blind man without a dog, or equilibrium in darkness." Browning would sometimes have us accept the evidence of his 'cane' as all-sufficient. He does not entrench himself among conventions: for he already finds himself within the fortified