And now what are we? unbelievers both, Calm and complete, determinately fixed To-day, to-morrow, and for ever, pray? You'll guarantee me that? Not so, I think. In no-wise! all we've gained is, that belief, As unbelief before, shakes us by fits, Confounds us like its predecessor. Where's The gain? how can we guard our unbelief? Make it bear fruit to us?--the problem here. Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch, A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, A chorus-ending from Euripides-- And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears As old and new at once as Nature's self, To rap and knock and enter in our soul, Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring, Round the ancient idol, on his base again-- The grand Perhaps! we look on helplessly-- There the old misgivings, crooked questions are-- This good God--what he could do, if he would, Would, if he could--then must have done long since: If so, when, where, and how? some way must be-- Once feel about, and soon or late you hit Some sense, in which it might be, after all. Why not, "The Way, the Truth, the Life?" Browning's love poetry does not properly enter into this discussion, since love is a common theme of poets, and this discussion deals with Browning's treatment of apparently unpoetical themes; but Browning's choice and treatment of situation in his love poems are so unusual as to bring them into the same class as his other realistic poems. Take as an example: See, how she looks now, drest In a sledging-cap and vest. 'Tis a huge fur cloak-- Like a reindeer's yoke Falls the lappet along the breast: Sleeves for her arms to rest, Or to hang, as my love likes best. These few examples will serve to show that the essential principles of Browning's realism and Wordsworth's are the same. Browning, like Wordsworth, claimed for poetry a greater licence both in subject matter and in form, but he went farther than Wordsworth in both. Wordsworth took for his new subjects the humble joys and sorrows of the poor--but all was fish that came to Browning's net. Any psychological situation, any out-of-the-way corner of human experience, became in his hands matter for poetry. Then as to form, Wordsworth merely refrained from the conventional language of poetry, but Browning boldly used language that was frankly unpoetical--uncouth, unmusical, rough, rhyming grotesquely, accented outrageously. Perhaps his most important advance on Wordsworth was in the use of the dramatic form--nearly all Browning's poems of the sort described are dramatic monologues--for when the speaker is professedly not the poet, we are less inclined to find an incongruity in unpoetical language. Browning, by adopting the dramatic form, gets at things from the subjective point of view, from the inside. Wordsworth tried to describe them objectively from the point of view of a spectator.