Between _Dichtung_ and _Wahrheit_ there was, indeed, in Browning's mind, a closer affinity than that simile suggests. His imagination was a factor in his apprehension of truth; his "poetry" cannot be detached from his interpretation of life, nor his interpretation of life from his poetry. Not that all parts of his apparent teaching belong equally to his poetic mind. On the contrary, much of it was derived from traditions of which he never shook himself clear; much from the exercise of a speculative reason which, though incomparably agile, was neither well disciplined in its methods nor particularly original in its grasp of principles. But with the vitalising heart of his faith neither tradition nor reasoning had so much to do as that logic of the imagination by which great poets often implicitly enunciate what the after-thinker slowly works out. The characteristic ways of Browning's poetry, the fundamental joys on which it fed, of which the present chapter attempts an account, by no means define the range or the limits of his interpreting intellect, but they mark the course of its deepest currents, the permanent channels which its tides overflow, but to which in the last resort they return. In the following chapter we shall have to study these fluctuating movements of his explicit and formulated thought, and to distinguish, if we may, the ground-tone of the deep waters from the more resonant roll of the shifting tides. CHAPTER X. THE INTERPRETER OF LIFE. His voice sounds loudest and also clearest for the things that as a race we like best; ... the fascination of faith, the acceptance of life, the respect for its mysteries, the endurance of its charges, the vitality of the will, the validity of character, the beauty of action, the seriousness, above all, of great human passion. --HENRY JAMES. I. The trend of speculative thought in Europe during the century which preceded the emergence of Browning may be described as a progressive integration along several distinct lines of the great regions of existence which common beliefs, resting on a still vigorous medievalism, thrust apart. Nature was brought into nearer relation with Man, and Man with God, and God with Nature and with Man. In one aspect, not the least striking, it was a "return to Nature"; economists from Adam Smith to Malthus worked out the laws of man's dependence upon the material world; poets and idealists from Rousseau to Wordsworth discovered in a life "according to nature" the ideal for man; sociologists from Hume to Bentham, and from Burke to Coleridge, applied to human society conceptions derived from physics or from biology, and emphasised all that connects it with the mechanical aggregate of atoms, or with the organism.