Page:Poet Lore, volume 4, 1892.djvu/506



OBERT BROWNING is par excellence the poet of democracy. His welcome in the New World was from the first that of one coming to hisown. “In America,” wrote Mrs. Browning, in 1859, “he is a power, a writer, a poet—he is read—he lives in the hearts of the people.”

Democracy, let us agree, is a word of both spiritual and structural significance. Its fundamental idea is self-sovereignty. Association or federation is the working principle of self-rule. On the one hand, democracy is the introduction of personal responsibility to one’s own nature ; it is opportunity for the development of personality. On the other hand, it is a principle of unity, operating, however, within the spiritual nature of man. Democracy, both with respect to self and to society, begins and ends with the individual; the soul is seen to be supreme amid every environment of thought or matter. A bard of democracy is, then, one who ministers to personality, not one who merely sings odes to Freedom or to Humanity, but who is himself an emancipating power, who rightly adjusts the soul to itself and to the world.