For thence,--a paradox Which comforts while it mocks,-- Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail: What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me: A brute I might have been, but would not sink i’ the scale. * * * * * XXIII. Not on the vulgar mass Called “work,” must sentence pass, Things done that took the eye and had the price; O’er which, from level stand, The low world laid its hand, Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice: XXIV. But all the world’s coarse thumb And finger failed to plumb, So passed in making up the main account: All instincts immature, All purposes unsure, That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man’s amount: XXV. Thoughts hardly to be packed Into a narrow act, Fancies that broke through language and escaped; All I could never be, All men ignored in me, This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped. The subject is almost precisely that of Longfellow’s Psalm of Life, but the object is not so much to give us courage as to confirm our courage by philosophy. The appeal is intellectual, not ethical. Yet this is very different from a treatise by Kant or Hegel. Browning the poet makes us _feel_ the truth. It is emotion that his philosophy, his Truth, arouses in us--an intellectual emotion, but none the less an emotion. We find the measured rhythm of poetry, but it is as far as possible from the songlike music of Tennyson’s lullaby. The mechanical limits and restrictions seem an excuse for unusual and almost strained images, but images that nevertheless carry conviction to our minds. There is, too, a beauty in the conception. This poetry is philosophy, but impassioned and inspired philosophy. Let us now read a poem still more lofty, a poem in which rare beauty, lofty nobility, and profound philosophy are mingled in almost equal proportions. I refer to Wordsworth’s Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey: