There is given to men the largest choice to do or to let alone, at every step in life.  But there is one necessity which they cannot escape, because they carry it within them.  They absolutely must try to make the world their home, find some kind of reconciling idea between themselves and the forces amidst which they move, have some kind of working hypothesis of life.  Nor is it possible to admit that they will find rest till they discover a true hypothesis.  If they do not seek it by reflection—­if, in their ardour to penetrate into the secrets of nature, they forget themselves; if they allow the supreme facts of their moral life to remain in the confusion of tradition, and seek to compromise the demands of their spirit by sacrificing to the idols of their childhood’s faith; if they fortify themselves in the indifference of agnosticism,—­they must reap the harvest of their irreflection.  Ignorance is not harmless in matters of character any more than in the concerns of our outer life.  There are in national and in individual history seasons of despair, and that despair, when it is deepest, is ever found to be the shadow of moral failure—­the result of going out into action with a false view of the purpose of human life, and a wrong conception of man’s destiny.  At such times, the people have not understood themselves or their environment, and, in consequence, they come into collision with their own welfare.  There is no experiment so dangerous to an age or people, as that of relegating to the common ignorance of unreasoning faith the deep concerns of moral conduct; and there is no attitude more pitiable than that which leads it to turn a deaf ear and the lip of contempt towards those philosophers who carry the spirit of scientific inquiry into these higher regions, and endeavour to establish for mankind, by the irrefragable processes of reason, those principles on which rest all the great elements of man’s destiny.  We cannot act without a theory of life; and to whom shall we look for such a theory, except to those who, undaunted by the difficulties of the task, ask once more, and strive to answer, those problems which man cannot entirely escape, as long as he continues to think and act?

CHAPTER III.

BROWNING’S PLACE IN ENGLISH POETRY.

“But there’s a great contrast between him and me.  He seems very content with life, and takes much satisfaction in the world.  It’s a very strange and curious spectacle to behold a man in these days so confidently cheerful.” (Carlyle.)

It has been said of Carlyle, who may for many reasons be considered as our poet’s twin figure, that he laid the foundations of his world of thought in Sartor Resartus, and never enlarged them.  His Orientirung was over before he was forty years old—­as is, indeed, the case with most men.  After that period there was no fundamental change in his view of the world; nothing which can