But warmer climes
Give brighter plumage, stronger wing: the breeze
Of Alpine heights thou playest with, borne on
Beyond Sorrento and Amalfi, where
The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.
--WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
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.
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