| spiritual death, and there is no death to be feared but that. Why, the very grasshopper

Spends itself in leaps all day

To reach the sun, you want the eyes
To see, as they the wings to rise

And match the noble hearts of them.

Would the grasshopper, with his "passionate life" change estate with the mole that gropes in his "veritable muck"? Thus the vision of life which shapes itself to Browning is the vision of a great world in which the spiritual is ever in peril of being throttled by the sordid.

The general issue of Browning's philosopy of life is, then, that life is probation and education. Nothing is of value in itself, but for what it leads to, for the help that it may yield the spirit in its long battle to gain enfranchisement from the flesh, and inheritance with God. Just as the utmost spoil of knowledge only serves to sting us with hunger for fuller light, so the utmost wealth of love only reveals to us the infinite possibilities of the love of God. There is "no pause in the leading and the light:"

There's heaven above, and night by night

I look right through its gorgeous roof;
For I intend to get to God.

Life has manifold sweet and pleasant uses; let the odour of the April, and the freshness of the sea, the miracle of science, the ineffable yearning of perfect music, or the spell of perfect art, find their just and proper place in the category of life; and be accepted. with no ascetic scruple, but genial gratitude. But they are nothing more than broken hints, by which men learn the alphabet of better life. And it is because to

rest in these things is death that Browning so eagerly applauds any life that flings itself away in endeavours after the distant and unattainable, and is at all times. so merciful toward earthly failure. He loves to show us that beneath the rough husk of lives which seem wasted, there lies hidden the true seed of a life which will one day bloom consummate in beauty. He loves equally to take up some apparently successful life, and pierce it with his caustic humour, and point out its essential emptiness with an irony so keen and stern that it would be bitter were it not softened by the pathos of a human-hearted pity. Above all, there is no touch of pessimism in him; he looks undismayed above present evils to the brightening of a diviner day.

Therefore, to whom turn I, but to Thee, the ineffable Name? Builder and Maker, Thou, of houses not made with hands! What, have fear of change from Thee, who art ever the same? Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that Thy power expands?

There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before.

The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;

On the earth, the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect

round.

H

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE SPIRIT OF BROWNING'S RELIGION.

AVING said so much as I have about Brown

ing's intense interest in life, it naturally follows that something should be said about his attitude. to religion, and the spirit of his religious teaching. The great poet is necessarily a great believer. The faculty which pierces to the unseen, and works in constant delicate contact with the invisible, is a faculty absolutely necessary to the equipment of a true poet. The poetry of faithlessness is an abnormal growth. It has little range or vitality. It never attains to really high and memorable results. When the spring of faith is broken, every faculty of the mind seems to share in the vast disaster. And especially do the faculties. of imagination, spiritual insight, and tender fancy, which are the master-architects of poetry, suffer. The loss of faith strikes a chill to the central core of being, and robs the artist of more than half the material from which the highest poetry is woven.

On the other hand, the power of spiritual apprehension is one of the surest signs whereby we know a great poet. It is the function of the great poet to be a seer and interpreter. He sees farther, deeper, and higher than ordinary men, and interprets for the common man what he dimly feels but does not fully

apprehend. It is quite possible that the message of the poet, the result of his spiritual insight, may not shape with our preconceived notions and theories; but where the spiritual insight is sure and real, the true poet never fails to quicken insight in his reader. Perhaps no man has done more in our generation to quicken and sharpen the spiritual insight of men than Browning. Pre-eminently he is a religious poet. Religion enters into all his work, like a fragrance or a colour which clings to some delicate and lovely fabric, and, while occasionally subdued or modified, is never lost. Browning's vast knowledge of the world never degenerates into worldliness. He seeks to know the world in all its aspects, all its strange and vague contradictions, and seeks rather than shuns its sad and seamy side. If he is an optimist it is not because he is an idealist, and the most striking thing about his optimism is that it thrives in the full knowledge of the baseness and evil of the world. But the curiosity which impels Browning to investigate the darker side. of life is never altogether an artistic curiosity: it is a religious curiosity. What then is the net result? What are the great facts on which he builds his faith? What are the sources of the religious buoyancy which is so remarkable in so thorough a citizen of the world, and especially in an age when so many of the foremost writers and thinkers have given themselves over to agnosticism or despair?

Now, the actual religion of a man can usually be reduced to a few simple truths which are grasped with entire belief, and thus become the working principles of his life. Few men believe with equal conviction all the various dogmas of religious truth; but while many may remain obscure, there are others which are revealed

with a vividness of light and force which constitute them henceforth the pillars of a man's real life. Thus, for instance, St. James has defined what pure religion and undefiled meant to him in one simple and sufficing formula-charity and unworldliness, visiting the fatherless, and keeping the soul unspotted from the world. So Browning has grasped, with all his force, certain religious truths which appear to him the soul and marrow of Christianity, and these constitute the spirit of his religion.

The best illustration of the working of Browning's genius in the realm of religious truth may be found in such a poem as "Easter Day." This poem is a wonderful poem in more respects than one: it is wonderful in its imagery, its intensity of insight, its daring, its vividness, the closeness of its reasoning, the sustained splendour of its diction, the prophetic force of its conclusions. It begins with the discussion of two speakers, who agree "How very hard it is to be a Christian." But each speaker utters the phrase in a different sense: the one finds Christianity hard as a matter of faith, unproved to the intellect; the other as a matter of practice, unrealised in the life. It would not be difficult to be a martyr, and find a Hand plunged through the flame to pluck the soul up to God, if, indeed, one could be certain of any such result; it is hard to believe on less than scientific evidence. To renounce the world on such evidence as we have would be folly. Suppose, after such renunciation, a man found he had given up the only world there was for him? Then ensues the poem itself, which consists of the description of a vision of the final judgment which the man of faith received, and which shook him out of the very web of negation in which his friend struggles.