We do this not only because they recur but because those that do recur have a vitality about them that makes us feel that they are characteristic of the author. I have tried to use these principles in my citations from Browning's dramatic monologues.

Page 234. Note 7. Since no room was given in the main discussion to Browning's views on political liberty a word may be said about them in this note. His views were individualistic and liberal. They are well summed up in the lines of a poem written in answer to the question, "Why I am a Liberal ?"

But little do or can the best of us:
That little is achieved through Liberty.
Who, then, dares hold, emancipated thus,
His fellow shall continue bound? Not I,
Who live, love, labor freely, nor discuss

A brother's right to freedom. That is "Why."

This is intensely personal, and one wonders why Browning did not have a greater sympathy for Wordsworth's political patriotism which, too, was intensely personal and at bottom very much like Browning's. What Wordsworth finely says of Milton was true of himself and of Browning:

Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free.

For Wordsworth there was one decree "that by the soul only, the Nations shall be great and free." And Browning grounded his sense of political freedom on this same basis.

Wordsworth, however, felt there were many radical and liberal movements that did not contribute to the freedom of the soul; and to such movements he was opposed. Browning, on the other hand, hoped that larger freedom

would result from practically every liberal political movement. Here the differences between the two were so great that the younger poet was unable to appreciate the position of the elder. Wordsworth was a conservative, who believed that movements toward political freedom must be of a fundamental and slow growing sort. Browning was a liberal, who believed that such movements must be aggressive and radical. And Tennyson, whose views have been discussed in their proper place, was a conservative-liberal, who expressed ideas adapted to practical politics.

INDEX

"Garden of Proserpine, The," "Locksley Hall, Sixty Years'

"Ring and the Book, The," 194, "Varieties of Religious Exper-