And ever and anon some bright white shaft

Burnt through the pine-tree roof, here burnt and there,
As if God's messenger through the close wood screen
Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture,
Feeling for guilty me and thee: then broke

The thunder like a whole sea overhead.

And Browning would have affirmed that the feeling of wrath in the lightning was as valid an experience as the sensation of its colour and flash; the one was created by the moral faculty, the other by the physical faculty; and, as far as reality is concerned, the revelation of nature in heart and conscience is as actual as that to eye and ear.

In Paracelsus, he gives us a profound reason for this sympathy between Nature and Man. Man is the final end of cosmic evolution; all the physical forces were feeling after conscious mind as the goal of their efforts. Nature meant Man in every stage of her ascent, and now he transfigures material phenomena with spiritual significance.

Man appears at last. So far the seal

Is put on life; one stage of being complete,
One scheme wound up; and from the grand result

A supplementary reflux of light

Illustrates all the inferior grades, explains

For their possessor dawns these qualities,

But the new glory mixes with the heaven

And earth; man once descried, imprints for ever
His presence in all lifeless things: the winds
Are henceforth voices, wailing or in a shout,
A querulous mutter or a quick gay laugh;
Never a senseless gust, now man is born!

I lay great stress on Browning's doctrine of nature

as the symbol of spirit, as the hieroglyph of the inner life of man. In Saul we have a superb illustration of this. Young David has been to the King to deliver him from the evil spirit by the ministry of song and music. After leaving Saul's tent, where he has had an overpowering vision of eternal Love in the depths of Godhead, David is walking home, and the whole world becomes glorified with Spiritual Presences. All creatures are struck with wonder at the Divine Mystery :— I know not too well how I found my way home in the night. There were witnesses, cohorts, about me, to left and to right, Angels, powers, the unuttered, unseen, the alive, the aware.I repressed, I got through them as hardly, as strugglingly there, As a runner beset by the populace famished for news

Life or death. The whole earth was awakened, hell loosed with her crews;

And the stars of night beat with emotion, and tingled and shot
Out in fire the strong pain of pent knowledge: but I fainted not,
For the Hand still impelled me at once and supported, suppressed
All the tumult, and quenched it with quiet, and holy behest,
Till the rapture was shut in itself, and the earth sank to rest.
Anon at the dawn, all that trouble had withered from earth—
Not so much, but I saw it die out in the day's tender birth;
In the gathered intensity brought to the grey of the hills;
In the shuddering forest's held breath; in the sudden wind-
thrills;

In the startled wild beasts that bore off, each with eye sidling

still,

Though averted with wonder and dread; in the birds stiff and

chill

That rose heavily as I approached them, made stupid with awe:
E'en the serpent that slid away silent-he felt the new law.
The same stared in the white humid faces upturned by the
flowers;

The same worked in the heart of the cedar and moved the vine

bowers:

C

And the little brooks witnessing murmured, persistent and low, With their obstinate, all but hushed voices—“E'en so, it is so!"

All nature is waiting to say Amen to the loftiest aspiration of Man and the supreme revelation of God.

3.—THE JUDGMENT OF CHARACTER.

Even in his interpretation of nature, Browning takes the soul, with its spiritual conditions, as the key to outward phenomena. We may specially call him the poet of man; and, still more accurately, the poet of character. Other poets have been interested in character, but not in exactly the same way. Shakspere is interested in character as it reveals itself in action, and as action influences other characters, modifies conditions, and evolves the complexities of a plot. Speaking generally, Shakspere uses character to develop action; Browning uses action to unfold character. Often, he eliminates every element of the narrative except that which is absolutely necessary to the discovery of the secrets of some soul; no side-lights shall distract your attention or deflect your interest; every ray shall be gathered into one intense focus of blazing light, until you see the soul naked and open as though before the judgment seat of God.

I know of no more striking example of this than the tragedy, compressed into one scene, called In a Balcony. The poet is profoundly interested in A CRISIS which has come in the relations that three persons sustain to one another, and he will fix the whole of your attention upon the way in which each of them reveals character under the stress of a supreme moment as it executes a

final judgment on their lives. He cannot waste his time telling you the story; you may guess it for yourself. From all the world he shuts in these three souls, and you shall see the Queen, Norbert and Constance working out their destinies on this balcony. At the beginning there are sounds of music and dancing in the adjoining palace; but here is a tragedy being achieved that makes that world of gaiety seem like an empty dream. At the end you listen to the tramp of soldiers coming to arrest the lovers; but here the two souls have found eternity in one moment of unutterable joy, and all that can come to them from the outside is but a passing trifle of the world of time; even the doom of death will only consummate their love. In the moment of deepening fate, Norbert cries :

Oh, some death

Will run its sudden finger round this spark
And sever us from the rest.

Many of these poems represent crises of experience, when the whole of the previous life must be precipitated into one final choice; and in every case we find that the decision is the result, not of an isolated act of will, but of the whole past life, the life through which a man has been forming his character and creating his destiny. Victor Hugo says, "Our acts make or mar us; we are the children of our deeds." In every thought, word and action of his commonplace daily life, the man has unconsciously been choosing the decision he must make in the hour of impending crisis. That is one secret of Sordello. Sordello has never been able to bring his mind and will into fruitful relation to the actual world; and yet, through his alternating moods of brood

7

ing thought, creative genius and human sympathy, the young Italian poet has yet been seeking the Highest; though often perplexed as to the right path, he has never been faithless to any ideal clearly revealed through the mists of doubt. So, when the great hour of temptation comes, when the Emperor's badge is thrown over his neck, when he is called to use his splendid gifts to serve a political party, his brave soul conquers in its agony, he stamps his foot upon the badge of earthly pride, and when his father and his lover enter, they find him dying, the world renounced and eternity won.

In another form, we are taught the same truth in that strangely weird poem, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. It is a fatal mistake to translate this poem as though it were a kind of Pilgrim's Progress; it only seems obscure to those readers who will insist on finding in it allegorical meanings which Browning never intended. In regard to such a poem, when any one objects to its obscurity, we can only say, "he that hath ears to hear, let him hear." It is a mood of the soul expressed in imaginative form; and if you have never experienced such a mood the whole thing is quite inexplicable. We can scarcely tell what it means, but we feel its meaning; it is a transcript of a dominant mood, and it fulfils its end if it succeeds in reproducing in the reader a certain state of mind. Here we have a soul at the most critical stage of moral experience. The hero once set out with a brave and exultant company to take some stronghold called the Dark Tower. They thought in a few days to accomplish their purpose, and return triumphant. But years have passed, terrible dangers have been endured, one by one his companions have perished, he alone is