human
I have, you are to know, Browning once wrote to Miss Haworth,
gpt
human
All poetry, he wrote some twenty years later to Ruskin,
gpt
Utterances like these, not conveyed through the lips of some
human
creation, but written seriously in his own person to intimate friends, give us a clue more valuable it may be than some other utterances which are oftener quoted and better known, to the germinal impulses of Browning's poetic work.
gpt
Finite and
human
were words continually on his lips, and it is clear that both sides of the antithesis represented instincts rooted in his mental nature, drawing nourishment from distinct but equally fundamental springs of feeling and thought. Each had its stronghold in a particular psychical region. The province and feeding-ground of his passion for
gpt
was that eager and restless self-consciousness which he so vividly described in _Pauline_, seeking to
human
to become all natures, like Sordello, yet retain the law of his own being.
gpt
I pluck the rose and love it more than tongue can speak, says the lover in _Two in the Campagna_. Browning had his full portion of the romantic idealism which, under the twofold stimulus of literary and political revolution, had animated the poetry of the previous generation. But while he clearly shared the uplifted aspiring spirit of Shelley, it assumed in him a totally different character. Shelley abhors limits, everything grows evanescent and ethereal before his solvent imagination, the infinity he aspires after unveils itself at his bidding, impalpable, undefined,
human
gpt
Whereas Browning's restlessly aspiring temperament worked under the control of an eye and ear that fastened with peculiar emphasis and eagerness upon all the limits, the dissonances, the angularities that Shelley's harmonising fancy dissolved away. The ultimate psychological result was that the brilliant clarity and precision of his imagined forms gathered richness and intensity of suggestion from the vaguer impulses of temperament, and that an association was set up between them which makes it literally true to say that, for Browning, the
human
is not the rival or the antithesis, but the very language of the
gpt
--that the vastest and most transcendent realities have for him their _points d'appui_ in some bit of intense life, some darting bird or insect, some glowing flower or leaf. Existence ebbs away from the large, featureless, monotonous things, to concentrate itself in a spiked cypress or a jagged mountain cleft. A placid soul without
human
arrests him less surely than the fireflies on a mossy bank. Hence, while
gpt
always appears, when explicitly contrasted with
human
as the inferior,--as something _soi-disant_ imperfect and incomplete,--its actual status and function in Browning's imaginative world rather resembles that of Plato's peras in relation to the apeiron,--the saving
gpt
which murders to dissect, and strove to strip language itself of every element of logic and fancy, as distortions of the truth, only to be uttered in the barest words, which comes to the heart that watches and receives. On all these issues Browning stands in sharp, if not quite absolute, contrast.
human
Barbarian, as he has been called, and as in a quite intelligible sense he was, he found his poetry pre-eminently among the pursuits, the passions, the interests and problems, of civilised men. His potent gift of imagination never tempted him, during his creative years, to assail the sufficiency of intellect, or to disparage the intellectual and
gpt
elements of speech; on the contrary, he appears from the outset employing in the service of poetry a discursive logic of unsurpassed swiftness and dexterity, and a vast heterogeneous army of words gathered, like a sudden levy, with a sole eye to their effective force, from every corner of civilised life, and wearing the motley of the most prosaic occupations. It was only in the closing years that he began to distrust the power of thought to get a grip upon reality. His delight in poetic argument is often doubtless that of the ironical casuist, looking on at the self-deceptions of a soul; but his interest in ideas was a rooted passion that gave a thoroughly new, and to many readers most unwelcome,
human
Yes to many sides of existence which his Romantic predecessors repudiated or ignored, he had some very definite limitations of his own. He gathered into his verse crowded regions of experience which they neglected; but some very glorious avenues of poetry pursued by them he refused to explore. Himself the most ardent believer in the supernatural among all the great poets of his time, the supernatural, as such, has hardly any explicit place in his poetry. To the eternal beauty of myth and folk-lore,--dream-palaces
gpt
--all that province of the poetical realm which in the memorable partition of 1797 Coleridge had taken for his own, splendidly emulated by Shelley and by Keats, Browning the Platonist maintained on the whole the attitude of the utilitarian man of facts.
human
Fairy-poetry, he agreed with Elizabeth Barrett in 1845-46, was
gpt
With a faith in a transcendent divine world as assured as Dante's or Milton's, he did not aspire to
human
or
gpt
No reader of _Gerard de Lairesse_ at one end of his career, or of the vision of _Paracelsus_ at the other, or _Childe Roland_ in the middle, can mistake the capacity; but habit is more trustworthy than an occasional _tour de force_; and Browning's imagination worked freely only when it bodied forth a life in accord with the waking experience of his own day.
human
A poet never dreams, said his philosophical Don Juan,