he did not follow or reflect from year to year the opinions of his time
on these great matters. When _Paracelsus_ was published in 1835 Browning
had fully thought out, and in that poem fully expressed, his theory of
God's relation to man, and of man's relation to the universe around him,
to his fellow men, and to the world beyond. It was a theory which was
original, if any theory can be so called. At least, its form, as he
expressed it, was clearly original. Roughly sketched in _Pauline_, fully
rounded in _Paracelsus_, it held and satisfied his mind till the day of
his death. But Tennyson had no clear theory about Man or Nature or God
when he began, nor was he afterwards, save perhaps when he wrote the
last stanzas of _In Memoriam_, a fully satisfied citizen of the city
that has foundations. He believed in that city, but he could not always
live in it. He grew into this or that opinion about the relations of God
and man, and then grew out of it. He held now this, now that view of
nature, and of man in contact with nature. There was always battle in
his soul; although he won his brittle in the end, he had sixty years of
war. Browning was at peace, firm-fixed. It is true the inward struggle
of Tennyson enabled him to image from year to year his own time better
than Browning did. It is true this struggle enabled him to have great
variety in his art-work when it was engaged with the emotions which
belong to doubt and faith; but it also made him unable to give to his
readers that sense of things which cannot be shaken, of faith in God and
in humanity wholly independent, in its depths, of storms on the surface
of this mortal life, which was one of Browning's noblest legacies to
that wavering, faithless, pessimistic, analysis-tormented world through
which we have fought our way, and out of which we are emerging.

4. The danger in art, or for an artist, of so settled a theory is that
in expression it tends to monotony; and sometimes, when we find almost
every poem of Browning's running up into his theory, we arrive at the