If I stoop

Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud,

It is but for a time; I press God's lamp

Close to my breast; its splendour, soon or late,
Will pierce the gloom: I shall emerge one day.

To Browning the soul is a supersensuous reality, not evolved out of matter, but only for a time environed by physical conditions to seeure identity, discipline, and a starting point for growth. When the body has done its work, the soul awakes:

As mid the dark, a gleam

Of yet another morning breaks,
And, like the hand which ends a dream,
Death, with the might of his sunbeam,
Touches the flesh, and the soul awakes,
Then!

Then, when at that touch of death the soul wakes from the dream of life, it will gather up its powers for another cycle in the endless progress of its being. We shall find all this enforced with great power in his love poems, especially in those which deal with separation, disappointment and death. The Love which seems to fail has yet done its work, it has quickened new visions and ampler activities; and when the soul passes from earth such love shall be made perfect.

In that touching poem, Evelyn Hope, the lover looks into the dead face of the maiden, and in his grief rallies himself by the assurance that such a love as his must, by its very intensity, find a supreme beatitude. As he looks, he says:

For God above

Is great to grant as mighty to make,
And creates the love to reward the love;
I claim you still for my own love's sake!
Delayed it may be for more lives yet,
Through worlds I shall traverse, not a few:
Much is to learn and much to forget

Ere the time be come for taking you.

So hush, I will give you this leaf to keep:
See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand!

There, that is our secret: go to sleep!

You will wake, and remember, and understand.

That leaf, pressed into the cold hand, is a token of the meeting which must come, though ages intervene, and new worlds are traversed before the appointed hour arrives.

That is the grandeur of Browning; the shadows only show him where the light is found. Suffering and imperfection only testify to the coming joy and triumph. Earthly incompleteness only prophesies the vaster destiny for which the soul is made. That is our chief glory,we can conceive a BEST beyond our utmost attainment, a radiant ideal beyond our highest reach, the quest of which brings out all the capabilities of our nature, and opens up to us an everlasting progress.

Love, wrong, and pain, what see I else around?
Yea, and the resurrection and uprise

To the right hand of the throne!

Remembering these things, it was with a chastened grief that we heard that our great teacher had passed away. Instantly we recalled those brave words in

which he looks death in the face, finding nothing to fear and everything to hope; and above all, is certain that he is about to clasp again that perfect wife who was the soul of his soul. In Prospice some one asks him if he does not fear death, if he would not prefer to pass away unconsciously without having to face its terrors.

cries:

:

Fear death? to feel the fog in my throat,

The mist in my face,

When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,

The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;

Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
Yet the strong man must go;

For the journey is done and the summit attained,
And the barriers fall,

Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained,
The reward of it all.

I was ever a fighter, so one fight more,

The best and the last!

I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore
And bade me creep past.

No! let me share the whole of it, fare like my peers
The heroes of old,

Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears
Of pain, darkness, and cold.

For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
The black minute's at end,

And the element's rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
Shall dwindle, shall blend,

Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
Then a light, then thy breast,

O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest.

He

CHAPTER III.

POEMS ON RELIGION.

One night Gabriel from his seat in Paradise heard the voice of God sweetly responding to a human heart. The angel said, "Surely this must be an eminent servant of the Most Holy, whose spirit is dead to lust and lives on high." The angel hastened over land and sea to find this man, but could not find him in the earth or heavens. At last he exclaimed, "O Lord! show me the way to this object of thy love." God answered, "Turn thy steps to yon village, and in that pagoda thou shalt behold him." The angel sped to the pagoda, and therein found a solitary man kneeling before an idol. Returning, he cried, "O Master of the world! hast thou looked with love on a man who invokes an idol in a pagoda?" God saith, "I consider not the error of ignorance: this heart, amid its darkness, hath the highest place."—From the Persian.

"Thou hast written well of me," said the Vision to St. Thomas of Acquino, "what reward wilt thou accept?" "Non alium nisi te Domine-no reward but thine own self, O Lord!" was the saint's reply.

Christmas Eve.

The great lesson of Christmas Eve is that the essence of Christianity is a self-sacrificing and redeeming love. The gods of the ancient world were chiefly characterised by the love of power, the Christian Deity displays the power

of love. Through all the different forms of faith into which Christianity is divided, men are groping their way to this sublime truth which must convert their natures and transfigure their lives.

I.

On Christmas Eve, 1849, the poet describes himself wandering on a common in a pitiless storm of wind and rain. He takes shelter in the porch of a little dissenting chapel, which stands between the common and the lowest quarter of a provincial town. It is nearly time for evening service, and he watches the members of the congregation push past him through the creaking door. Weary women, sickly men and miserable children come gathering from the filthy lanes of the town and from the hovels in the gravel-pits across the common. To these poor creatures the white-washed chapel seems the only way to heaven. Out of their squalor and toil and wretchedness they gather into what seems to them the house of God, where they get glimpses of some higher life, some divine comfort and immortal hope. The poet watches them; he sees the rude and almost angry glances they cast upon the intruder who blocks up the narrow door way to their Mount Zion. So, as the storm increases, he decides to leave the uncomfortable position and enter the chapel and join in the service. But he finds the thing intolerable. The preacher is a converted drunkard, coarse, uneducated and dogmatic. He was converted from a brutal life by the warnings and invitations of the Bible; and on the strength of that conversion he thinks he can expound all the hid