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 peras in relation to the apeiron,--the saving "limit" which gives definite existence to the limitless vague.
II.
Hence Browning, while a romantic in temper, was, in comparison with his predecessors, a thorough realist in method.

All the Romantic poets of the previous generation had refused and decried some large portion of reality.

Wordsworth had averted his ken from half of human fate; Keats and Shelley turned from the forlornness of human society as it was to the transfigured humanity of myth.

All three were out of sympathy with civilisation; and their revolt went much deeper than a distaste for the types of men it bred.

They attacked a triumphant age of reason in its central fastness, the brilliant analytic intelligence to which its triumphs were apparently due.