Shelley,--that of throwing "films" for the connexion of Power and Love
in the abstract with Beauty and Good in the concrete, and finding a link
between the lowliest service or worship and the spirit of God. Such a
conception of a poet's crowning glory implied a peculiarly close
relation in Browning's view between poetry and religion, and in
particular with the religion which, above all others, glorified the
lowly. Here lay, in short, the supreme worth for him of the Christian
idea. "The revelation of God in Christ" was for him the consummate
example of that union of divine love with the world--"through all the
web of Being blindly wove"--which Shelley had contemplated in the
radiant glow of his poetry; accepted by the reason, as he wrote a few
years later, it solved "all problems in the earth and out of it." To
that solution Shelley seemed to Browning to be on the way, and his
incomplete grasp of it appealed to him more powerfully than did the
elaborate dogmatisms professedly based upon it. Shelley had mistaken
"Churchdom" for Christianity; but he was on the way, Browning was
convinced, to become a Christian himself. "I shall say what I
think,--had Shelley lived he would have finally ranged himself with the
Christians."

This emphatic declaration is of great importance for Browning's
intellectual history. He may have overlooked the immense barriers which
must have always divided Shelley from the Christian world of his time;
he may have overlooked also that the Christian thought of our time has
in some important points "ranged itself with" Shelley; so that the
Christianity which he might finally have adopted would have been
sufficiently unlike that which he assailed. But it is clear that for
Browning himself the essence of Christianity lay at this time in
something not very remote from what he revered as the essence of
Shelleyism--a corollary, as it were, ultimately implicit in his thought.