But even stronger than the curiosity was the eager individualism of this time, which extended into every sphere of human thought and action, and only began about 1866 to be balanced by an equally strong tendency towards collectivism.
These two elements in the time-spirit did not produce, in a settled state like England, the outward war and confusion they produced in the thirteenth century, though they developed after 1840, in '48, into a European storm--but they did produce a confused welter of mingled thoughts concerning the sources and ends of human life, the action it should take, and why it should take it.

The poetry of Arnold and Clough represents with great clearness the further development in the soul of man of this confusion.

I think that Browning has represented in the first three books of _Sordello_ his passage through this tossing sea of thought.
He had put into _Paracelsus_ all that he had worked out with clearness during his youth; his theory of life is stated with lucidity in that poem.

But when it was finished, and he had entered, like Sordello from Goito into Mantua, into the crowd and clash of the world; when, having published _Pauline_ and _Paracelsus_, he had, like Sordello, met criticism and misunderstanding, his Paracelsian theory did not seem to explain humanity as clearly as he imagined.

It was only a theory; Would it stand the test of life among mankind, be a saving and healing prophecy?
Life lay before him, now that the silent philosophising of poetic youth was over, in all its inexplicable, hurried, tormented, involved, and multitudinously varied movement.