II. Antagonistic elements of Browning's intellect; resulting fluctuations of his thought. Two conceptions of Reality. Ambiguous treatment of "Matter"; of Time 290 III. Conflicting tendencies in his conception of God 295 IV. Conflicting tendencies in his treatment of Knowledge 297 V. Proximate solution of these antagonisms in the conception of Love 300 VI. Final estimate of Browning's relation to the progressive and conservative movements of his age 304 INDEX 310 PART I. BROWNING'S LIFE AND WORK BROWNING. CHAPTER I. EARLY LIFE. _PARACELSUS_. The Boy sprang up ... and ran, Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought. --_A Death in the Desert_. Dass ich erkenne, was die Welt Im Innersten zusammenhält. --_Faust_. Judged by his cosmopolitan sympathies and his encyclopædic knowledge, by the scenery and the persons among whom his poetry habitually moves, Browning was one of the least insular of English poets. But he was also, of them all, one of the most obviously and unmistakably English. Tennyson, the poetic mouthpiece of a rather specific and exclusive Anglo-Saxondom, belonged by his Vergilian instincts of style to that main current of European poetry which finds response and recognition among cultivated persons of all nationalities; and he enjoyed a European distinction not attained by any other English poet since Byron. Browning, on the contrary, with his long and brilliant gallery of European creations, Browning, who claimed Italy as his "university," remains, as a poet, all but unknown even in Italy, and all but non-existent for the rest of the civilised world beyond the Channel. His cosmopolitan sympathies worked through the medium of a singularly individual intellect; and the detaching and isolating effect which pronounced individuality of thinking usually produces, even in a genial temperament, was heightened in his case by a robust indifference to conventions of all kinds, and not least to those which make genius easily intelligible to the plain man.