Tennyson has a vivid feeling of the dignity and potency of
_law_.... Browning vividly feels the importance, the greatness
and beauty of passions and enthusiasms, and his imagination
is comparatively unimpressed by the presence of law and its
operations.... It is not the order and regularity in the processes of
the natural world which chiefly delight Browning's imagination, but
the streaming forth of power, and will, and love from the whole face
of the visible universe....

Tennyson considers the chief instruments of human progress to be a
vast increase of knowledge and of political organization. Browning
makes that progress dependent on the production of higher passions,
and aspirations,--hopes, and joys, and sorrows; Tennyson finds the
evidence of the truth of the doctrine of progress in the universal
presence of a self-evolving law. Browning obtains his assurance of
its truth from inward presages and prophecies of the soul, from
anticipations, types, and symbols of a higher greatness in store for
man, which even now reside within him, a creature ever unsatisfied,
ever yearning upward in thought, feeling, and endeavour.

... Hence, it is not obedience, it is not submission to the law
of duty, which points out to us our true path of life, but rather
infinite desire and endless aspiration. Browning's ideal of manhood
in this world always recognizes the fact that it is the ideal of a
creature who never can be perfected on earth, a creature whom other
and higher lives await in an endless hereafter....

The gleams of knowledge which we possess are of chief value because
they "sting with hunger for full light." The goal of knowledge, as of
love, is God himself. Its most precious part is that which is least