perhaps wandering often along the ramparts of the old town,
introspective even then, with something of that rare and insatiable
curiosity which we all now recognise as so distinctive of Sainte-Beuve.
Again, the greatest creative literary artist of the century, in prose at
any rate, was leading an apparently somewhat indolent schoolboy life at
Tours, undreamful yet of enormous debts, colossal undertakings, gigantic
failures, and the _Comédie Humaine._ In art, Sir Henry Raeburn, William
Blake, Flaxman, Canova, Thorwaldsen, Crome, Sir Thomas Lawrence,
Constable, Sir David Wilkie, and Turner were in the exercise of their
happiest faculties: as were, in the usage of theirs, Beethoven, Weber,
Schubert, Spohr, Donizetti, and Bellini.

It is not inadvisedly that I make this specification of great names, of
men who were born coincidentally with, or were in the broader sense
contemporaries of Robert Browning. There is no such thing as a
fortuitous birth. Creation does not occur spontaneously, as in that
drawing of David Scott's where from the footprint of the Omnipotent
spring human spirits and fiery stars. Literally indeed, as a great
French writer has indicated, a man is the child of his time. It is a
matter often commented upon by students of literature, that great men do
not appear at the beginning, but rather at the acme of a period. They
are not the flying scud of the coming wave, but the gleaming crown of
that wave itself. The epoch expends itself in preparation for these
great ones.

If Nature's first law were not a law of excess, the economy of life
would have meagre results. I think it is Turgenïev who speaks somewhere
of her as a gigantic Titan, working in gloomy silence, with the same
savage intentness upon a subtler twist of a flea's joints as upon the
Destinies of Man.