Of course we shall miss perfection--who can get side by side with infinitude ?--but we shall grow out of the dead perfection of the past, and live and move, and have our being.
Let the visible go to the dogs--what matters ?" Thus art began again.

Its spring-tide came, dim and dewy; and the world rejoiced.
And that is what has happened again and again in the history of art.
Browning has painted a universal truth.

It was that which took place when Wordsworth, throwing away the traditions of a century and all the finished perfection, as men thought, of the Augustan age, determined to write of man as man, whatever the issue; to live with the infinite variety of human nature, and in its natural simplicities.

What we shall see, he thought, may be faulty, common, unideal, imperfect.

What we shall write will not have the conventional perfection of Pope and Gray, which all the cultivated world admires, and in which it rests content--growth and movement dead--but it will be true, natural, alive, running onwards to a far-off goal.