the midst of the shifting storms of doubt and trouble, of mockery,
contradiction, and assertion on religious matters, he stood unremoved.
Whatever men may think of his faith and his certainties, they reveal the
strength of his character, the enduring courage of his soul, and the
inspiring joyousness that, born of his strength, characterised him to
the last poem he wrote. While the other poets were tossing on the sea of
unresolved Question, he rested, musing and creating, on a green island
whose rocks were rooted on the ocean-bed, and wondered, with the smiling
tolerance of his life-long charity, how his fellows were of so little
faith, and why the sceptics made so much noise. He would have reversed
the Psalmist's cry. He would have said, "Thou art not cast down, O my
soul; thou art not disquieted within me. Thou hast hoped in God, who is
the light of thy countenance, and thy God."

At first the world, enamoured of its own complex discords, and pleased,
like boys in the street, with the alarms it made, only cared for that
part of Browning which represented the tangle and the clash, and ignored
his final melody. But of late it has begun, tired of the restless
clatter of intellectual atoms, to desire to hear, if possible, the
majestic harmonies in which the discords are resolved. And at this point
many at present and many more in the future will find their poetic and
religious satisfaction in Browning. At the very end, then, of the
nineteenth century, in a movement which had only just begun, men said to
themselves, "Browning felt beforehand what we are beginning to hope for,
and wrote of it fifty, even sixty years ago. No one cared then for him,
but we care now."

Again, though he thus anticipated the movements of the world, he did
not, like the other poets, change his view about Nature, Man and God. He
conceived that view when he was young, and he did not alter it. Hence,