In their political ideals, the one strove for progress, and for freedom as its condition; the other for order, and for active legal intervention as its safeguard.
In two of these four points of contrast, Browning's temperament ranged him more or less decisively on the Liberal side.

Individualist to the core, he was conspicuously deficient in the kind of social mind which makes a poet the voice of an organised community, a nation, or a class.
Progress, again, was with him even more an instinct than a principle; and he became the _vates sacer_ of unsatisfied aspiration.

On the other hand, that he was not without elements of the temper which makes for order was shown by his punctilious, almost eager, observance of social conventions, and, in the last years of his life, by the horror excited in him by what he took to be the anarchy of Women's Suffrage and Home Rule.

In the other two fields of opposition he belonged decisively to the spiritual and emotional reaction.

Spirit was for him the ultimate fact of existence, the soul and God were the indissoluble realities.