I.
"I have, you are to know," Browning once wrote to Miss Haworth, "such a love for flowers and leaves ... that I every now and then in an impatience at being unable to possess them thoroughly, to see them quite, satiate myself with their scent,—bite them to bits." "All poetry," he wrote some twenty years later to Ruskin, "is the problem of putting the infinite into the finite." Utterances like these, not conveyed through the lips of some "dramatic" creation, but written seriously in his own person to intimate friends, give us a [clue] more valuable it may be than some other utterances which are oftener quoted and better known, to the germinal impulses of Browning's poetic work. "Finite" and "infinite" were words continually on his lips, and it is clear that both sides of the antithesis represented instincts rooted in his mental nature, drawing nourishment from distinct but equally fundamental springs of feeling and thought. Each had its stronghold in a particular psychical region. The province and feeding-ground of his passion for "infinity" was that eager and restless self-consciousness which he so vividly described in Pauline, seeking to "be all, have, see, know, taste, feel all," to become all natures, like Sordello, yet retain the law of his own being. "I pluck the rose and love it more than tongue can speak," says the lover in Two in the Campagna. Browning had his full portion of the romantic idealism which, under the twofold stimulus of literary and political revolution, had animated the poetry of the previous generation. But while he clearly shared the uplifted aspiring spirit of Shelley, it assumed in him a totally different character. Shelley abhors limits, everything grows evanescent and ethereal before his solvent imagination, the infinity he aspires after unveils itself at his bidding, impalpable, undefined, "intense," "inane." Whereas Browning's restlessly aspiring temperament worked under the control of an eye and ear that fastened with peculiar emphasis and eagerness upon all the limits, the dissonances, the angularities that Shelley's harmonising fancy dissolved away. The [ultimate] psychological result was that the brilliant clarity and precision of his imagined forms gathered richness and intensity of suggestion from the vaguer impulses of temperament, and that an association was set up between them which makes it literally true to say that, for Browning, the "finite" is not the rival or the antithesis, but the very language of the "infinite,"—that the vastest and most transcendent realities have for him their points d'appui in some bit of intense life, some darting bird or insect, some glowing flower or leaf. Existence ebbs away from the large, featureless, monotonous things, to concentrate itself in a spiked cypress or a jagged mountain cleft. A placid soul without "incidents" arrests him less surely than the fireflies on a mossy bank. Hence, while "the finite" always appears, when explicitly contrasted with "the infinite," as the inferior,—as something soi-disant imperfect and incomplete,—its actual status and function in Browning's imaginative world rather resembles that of Plato's περας in relation to the απειρον,—the saving "limit" which gives definite existence to the limitless vague.