But even here the psychological barrier is apparent, against which all the surge of pantheistic impulse in Browning broke in vain.

This God of manifold joys was sharply detached from his universe; he was a sensitive and sympathetic spectator, not a pervading spirit.

In every direction human personality opposed rigid frontiers which even the infinite God could not pass, and no poet less needed the stern warning which he addressed to German speculation against the "gigantic stumble"[131] of making them one.

The mystic's dream of seeing all things in God, the Hegelian thesis of a divine mind realising itself in and through the human, found no lodgment in a consciousness of mosaic-like clearness dominated by the image of an incisively individual and indivisible self.

In later life the sharp lines which he drew from the first about individual personality became a ring-fence within which each man "cultivated his plot,"[132] managing independently as he might the business of his soul.