From the romantic poetry of the early years of the nineteenth century comes a cry or a sigh of limitless desire. Under the inspiration of the Revolutionary movement passion had broken the bounds of the eighteenth century ideal of balance and moderation. With the transcendental reaction against a mechanical view of the relation of God to the universe and to humanity the soul had put forth boundless claims and unmeasured aspirations. In his poetic method each writer followed the leadings of his own genius, without reference to common rules and standards; the individualism of the Revolutionary epoch asserted itself to the full. These several influences helped to determine the character of Browning's poetry. But meeting in him the ethical and religious tendencies of English Puritanism they acquired new significances and assumed new forms. The cry of desire could not turn, as it did with Byron, to cynicism; it must not waste itself, as sometimes happened with Shelley, in the air or the ether. It must be controlled by the will and turned to some spiritual uses. The transcendental feeling which Wordsworth most often attained through an impassioned contemplation of external nature must rest upon a broader basis and include among its sources or abettors all the higher passions of humanity. The Revolutionary individualism must be maintained and extended; in his methods Browning would acknowledge no master; he would please himself and compel his readers to accept his method even if strange or singular. As for the mediaeval revival, which tried to turn aside, and in part capture, the transcendental tendencies of his time, Browning rejected it, in the old temper of English Puritanism, on the side of religion; but on the side of art it opened certain avenues upon which he eagerly entered. The scientific movement of the nineteenth century influenced him partly as a force to be met and opposed by his militant transcendentalism. Yet he gives definite expression in _Paracelsus_ to an idea of evolution both in nature and in human society, an idea of evolution which is, however, essentially theistic. "All that seems proved in Darwin's scheme," he wrote to Dr Furnivall in 1881, "was a conception familiar to me from the beginning." The positive influences of the scientific age in which he lived upon Browning's work were chiefly these--first it tended to intellectualise his instincts, compelling him to justify them by a definite theory; and secondly it co-operated with his tendency towards realism as a student of the facts of human nature; it urged him towards research in his psychology of the passions; it supported him in his curious inquisition of the phenomena of the world of mind.