rhythm of the national life at its turbulent, congested, but ever
ebullient centre. Certainly Browning was not the man to be ashamed of
his being a Londoner, much less to deny his natal place. He was proud of
it: through good sense, no doubt, but possibly also through some
instinctive apprehension of the fact that the great city was indeed the
fit mother of such a son. "Ashamed of having been born in the greatest
city of the world!" he exclaimed on one occasion; "what an extraordinary
thing to say! It suggests a wavelet in a muddy shallow grimily
contorting itself because it had its birth out in the great ocean."

On the day of the poet's funeral in Westminster Abbey, one of the most
eminent of his peers remarked to me that Browning came to us as one
coming into his own. This is profoundly true. There was in good sooth a
mansion prepared against his advent. Long ago, we should have
surrendered as to a conqueror: now, however, we know that princes of the
mind, though they must be valorous and potent as of yore, can enter upon
no heritance save that which naturally awaits them, and has been made
theirs by long and intricate processes.

The lustrum which saw the birth of Robert Browning, that is the third in
the nineteenth century, was a remarkable one indeed. Thackeray came into
the world some months earlier than the great poet, Charles Dickens
within the same twelvemonth, and Tennyson three years sooner, when also
Elizabeth Barrett was born, and the foremost naturalist of modern times
first saw the light. It is a matter of significance that the great wave
of scientific thought which ultimately bore forward on its crest so many
famous men, from Brewster and Faraday to Charles Darwin, had just begun
to rise with irresistible impulsion. Lepsius's birth was in 1813, and
that of the great Flemish novelist, Henri Conscience, in 1812: about the
same period were the births of Freiligrath, Gutzkow, and Auerbach,