There is a stronger manhood in them, a grimmer view of life.

The sense of duty to God and Man, but little represented in the Italian poems of the Renaissance, does exist in these two German poems.

Moreover, there is in them a full representation of aspiration to the world beyond.

But the Italian Renaissance lived for the earth alone, and its loveliness; too close to earth to care for heaven.
It pleased Browning to throw himself fully into the soul of Johannes Agricola; and he does it with so much personal fervour that it seems as if, in one of his incarnations, he had been the man, and, for the moment of his writing, was dominated by him.

The mystic-passion fills the poetry with keen and dazzling light, and it is worth while, from this point of view, to compare the poem with Tennyson's _Sir Galahad_, and on another side, with _St.Simeon Stylites_.
Johannes Agricola was one of the products of the reforming spirit of the sixteenth century in Germany, one of its wild extremes.