by means of the very ignorance which sets each man to tackle it for
himself, believing that he alone can."[16] Mr. Browning rejects at least
the _show_ of knowledge which gives you a name for what you die of;
and that deepening of ignorance which comes of the perpetual insisting
that fountains of knowledge spring everywhere for those who choose to
dispense it. "What science teaches is made useless by the shortness of
human existence; it absorbs all our energy in building up a machine
which we shall have no time to work. All direct truth comes to us from
the poet: whether he be of the smaller kind who only see, or the
greater, who can tell what they have seen, or the greatest who can make
others see it." Corresponding instances follow.[17]

Mr. Browning is aware that one is a poet at his own risk; and that the
poetic chaplet may also prove a sacrificial one. He will still wear it,
however, because in his case it means the suffrage of a "patron
friend"[18]

"Whose great verse blares unintermittent on
Like your own trumpeter at Marathon,--" (vol. i. p. 169.)

He recalls his readers to the "business" of the poem:

"the fate of such
As find our common nature--overmuch
Despised because restricted and unfit
To bear the burthen they impose on it--
Cling when they would discard it; craving strength
To leap from the allotted world, at length
They do leap,--flounder on without a term,
Each a god's germ, doomed to remain a germ