In my inmost heart, Believe, I think of stealing quite away To walk once more with Wentworth-my youth's friend, "The Lost Leader" ends thus in the same note: "Life's night begins: let him never come back to us! Best fight on well, for we taught him—strike gallantly, Something of the same kind of connection, that of belonging to the same time and growing out of the same studies, we find between "A Grammarian's Funeral" and "Paracelsus." As the latter gives the portraiture of a man mingling thirst for knowledge with lower ambition, and finding, therefore, that all is vanity, so the former exhibits something of the life of the Scaligers and Casaubons, of many an early scholar, like Roger Bacon's friend, Pierre de Maricourt, working at some one region of knowledge, and content to labor without fame so long as he mastered thoroughly whatever he undertook: "Oh, if we draw a circle premature, Greedy for quick returns of profit, sure, Was it not great? Did not he throw on God (He loves the burthen), God's task to make the heavenly period Perfect the earthen? Did not he magnify the mind, show clear Just what it all meant? He would not discount life, as fools do here, Paid by instalment." We must hasten on; but before pass- | from which he shrinks. The demoniac ing to the last division of inquiry we must glance at what seem to us at once among the most powerful and the least pleasing of Mr. Browning's poems. With a taste which reminds one of Teniers or Callot in their wildest and most grotesque moments, he appears sometimes to revel in what is horrible, repulsive, mentally or even physically loathsome. It is true that this never takes the form which, in a sensational artist of a lower kind, it would have done, and (with the exception of one scene in "Pippa Passes") there is scarcely a passage in his poems, from first to last, which ministers to lubricity of thought. But with the exception of that perilous region, there is hardly any other abyss of man's nature malignity of persecution, as in "The are "And the mother smelt blood with her cat-like instinct, "So glancing at her wolf-skin vesture, If such it was, for they grow so hirsute That their own fleece serves for natural fur-suit." "And at last, as its haven some buffeted ship sees (Come all the way from the north parts with sperm oil), I hope to get safely out of the turmoil." One more we add, with the wish, as we it had been more kept in view throughread the "Flight of the Duchess," that out that poem: "And were I not, as a man may say, cautious Even here, however, as in "Holy Cross Day," and the latter of the two poems just named, there are passages hardly equalled elsewhere for their loftiness and beauty. Mr. Browning feels, and leads his readers to feel, that underneath what is most trivial and most repulsive there are abysses of infinite awfulness. Nothing in the life of man is altogether little. Enough has been given to show those who are as yet strangers to his works, what Mr. Browning's readers have felt from the first, that he is as remote as possible from the conventionalisms of any school. Well-nigh every poem opens with an abruptness that takes one's breath away. We have to take a header into deep water. If we can swim we shall strike out with a fresh sense of strength and enjoyment, and a course of such plunges acts on the whole mental framework, the sinews and nerves of thought, as a health-giving tonic. If we can't, we lose our footing and our breath, the salt brine gets into our eyes and mouth, and we emerge with a sense of dislike and bewilderment, shivering and half disposed to confine ourselves for the future to the smoother lakes and fresh water pools, where we walk in quietly and have no chance of getting out of our depth. But with any reader of the former type it is surprising how soon Mr. Browning leads us into the heart of a subject, and keeps us spell-bound to the It seems, for example, a somewhat abrupt opening to start with end. "What's become of Waring Since he gave us all the slip? Boots and chest, or staff and scrip, And what follows is no narrative, simply the sketch of a character-the portrait of a man of many gifts and varied tastes, capable of great things, and winning many hearts; but we learn, as we go on, to become one of the man's familiar friends, and when we hear how he reappeared in a pilot-boat on the Adriatic, and was once more lost sight of, it seems simply natural, and of course, to join in the exclamation— "Oh, never star Look East, where whole new thousands are, III. The attempt to estimate the theology of a poet whose works no critic or publisher would class under the head of religious poetry may seem open to the charge that we are judging them by a standard which is altogether inapplicable. It is easy to sneer at the thought of testing a poet's excellence by the measure of his conformity with the Thirty-nine Articles, or with the evangelical or catholic tendencies of the schools that claim shelter under those names. To some minds, indeed, the. thought of any ethical purpose in a poet seems to introduce an alien and deteriorating element. Such an one seems to them, as Mr. Swinburne has said of Wordsworth, to be simply using nature to make pottage, and they prefer the "divine lust," the "etwas damonisch," of a poet who, like Byron, foams and rushes on in the wild recklessness of a morbid and frenzied passion. With those, however, who hold that all energy is at its highest point when it is under the control of will, and that a will which, exercising this control, directs the. down the slopes of Avernus, till the darkest phases of human passion and sensual sin have an irresistible fascination for him. Art and poetry seem alike in dan energy to truth and goodness, is immeasurably higher than one that degrades itself by a voluntary bondage to what is false and evil, the ethical worth and influence of a poet cannot be ex-ger, in such cases, of as infinite a decluded from our survey of his character and merits as such. Such at least has been the faith in which the greatest of our poets have lived and acted. Spenser, the "sage and serious," sought with Mere reckless delight in the exuberance of power and the glow of passion, or in the fame which they bring with them, may produce the Byronic moodiness, or the fevered glow that burnt out the lives of Chatterton and Keats, but it is fatal to the attainment of any high and lasting excellence.* The school of revived paganism which began with the last-named poet, and has culminated in Mr. Swinburne, has in it, artistically as well as morally, all the evils of apostacy. The poet who, born in Christendom, would fain live and write as though "suckled in a creed outworn," is sure to glide Those who have been led by Archbishop Trench's Stratford sermon, or Bishop Wordsworth's larger work, to look on Shakespeare almost as a theologian with catholic sympathies, a devout reader and sound interpreter of the Bible, may wonder at the omission of the greatest name in English literature from this induction. We are constrained to own that, with him as with Goethe, evidence of this ethical purpose is precisely what we fail to find. There is, it is true, no preference of evil over good, of vice over virtue. He holds his mirror up to nature, and shows virtue her own image and vice her own deformity; and the very truthfulness of the representation leads us, as the realities do, to hate the one and love the other; and so, in spite of their impurities, the ultimate tendency and dominant tone of his dramas is on the right side, purifying and not corrupting, but we do not trace the desire that this should be so. As Goethe said, with less truth, of Sophocles, "He knew the stage, and understood his craft." NEW SERIES-VOL. V., No. 4. basement as when they ministered to the diseased imagination of Tiberius among the rocks of Capri. And if we believe that, in a far higher sense than the words commonly receive, Christianity is morality, that the highest ethical and the highest religious truth are mutually interdependent, then it is no idle or alien question to ask of any poet whose power calls for such a scrutiny as this, What is his relation to the belief of Christians? how far has he entered into its life? how far is he likely to make that life nobler and more true? It is obvious that neither Mr. Tennyson nor Mr. Browning stands in this rethe Christian Year. Нe, in heart and spect on the same footing as the author of soul the child of Anglicanism, lived under the shadow of the English Church, thought and felt as she taught him, look ed on nature as foreshadowing or interpreting that teaching-as bringing man's restless temper into harmony with her repose. He seems not so much to have resisted the temptation to stray beyond her boundaries, as never to have felt it. All dramatic dealing with man's fiercer and more lawless passions would have been in his eyes a sin. He could not revel in the beauty and glory of nature for their own sake, but must learn their lesson of "sweet content" and "calm decay." The mythologies of ancient creeds were for him, with all his scholarlike knowledge of the literature of Greece and Rome, forbidden ground; and to sing of them would have been like burning incense on the altars of Baal. Even in the vast field which the books of the Old and New Testaments open to the imagination, he deliberately narrowed the region within which he moved. He read the Bible through the Prayer-book. The wild life of patriarchs-the dramatic incidents and characters of judges, kings, prophets-the thousand suggestions of pathos and passion in the Gospels, were to him as Sunday lessons, from which, reverentially, tenderly, devoutly, he derived strength or hope, warning or consolation. He avowedly wrote to lead oth 33 ers to feel the "soothing character" of the | teaching of the Prayer-book, and would have turned away from any merely dramatic representation of the facts or characters of Scripture as irreverent. Dr. Newman, indeed, little as he is known to most readers in this character, had in him the elements of a far greater poet than his friend. Nothing that Mr. Keble ever wrote can compare in power with the short, half-fragmentary poems of "Lead, kindly Light," "The Elements," "Hidden Saints," "Rest," " David," "Saints Departed," in the Lyra Apostolica, or the more recent Dream of Gerontius. Here and there, indeed, we have touches of vivid scene-painting-the "blossoms red and bright," the prophet's "wild hair floating in the eastern breeze' -but for the most part the pictorial and the dramatic elements are alike absent, and we see only the communings of a devout and meditative mind. And this, we think, explains the influence for good which the Christian Year has exercised, not only over tens of thousands of "children and child-like souls" like-minded with his own, but over many who stand almost at the opposite extreme of religious thought. Writers who have never known the order and teaching of the Church, to whom the religious life is an unknown region, will simply sneer at poetry that ties itself down to the order of the twenty-five Sundays after Trinity, and will turn to the sensuous or passionate verse which is more in harmony with their tastes. But men of nobler mindssuch, for example, as Mr. Maurice and Dean Stanley-though they have passed on to regions of thought and criticism from which Mr. Keble would have shrunk, and hold opinions which he would have condemned as perilous and unsound, still turn to him with a true and loving reverence. They cannot forget what they once owed to him. He exercises over them that soothing influence which he most prayed for. He brings back to them something of the child-like spirit which the stir and conflict of the time, or the fascination of the pictorial aspects of sacred history, tend to wear away. Mr. Browning's influence, we need hardly say, is of a very different character. His creed is less definite, his temper less submissive, his handling of sacred themes bolder and more free, and the essentially dramatic character of most of his poems makes it difficult for us to determine how far he is speaking in his own person, or representing some phase of the great drama of man's religious life. No living writer-and we do not know any one in the past who can be named, in this respect, in the same breath with himapproaches his power of analyzing and reproducing the morbid forms, the corrupt semblances, the hypocrisies, formalisms, and fanaticisms of that life. The wildness of an Antinomian predestinarianism has never been so grandly painted as in "Johannes Agricola in Meditation:" "For as I lie, smiled on, full fed By unexhausted power to bless, One altar-smoke, so pure!—to win, The martyr, the wan acolyte, The white heat of the persecutor glares on us, like a nightmare spectre, in "The Heretic's Tragedy." More subtle forms are drawn with greater elaboration. If "Bishop Blougram's Apology," in many of its circumstances and touches, sug. gests the thought of actual portraiture, recalling a form and face once familiar to us, seen in gorgeous pontificals at high ceremonies, or lecturing to curious crowds in Albemarle-street, it is also a picture of a class of minds which we meet with everywhere. Conservative skepticism that persuades itself that it believes, cynical acuteness in discerning the weak points either of mere secularism or dream ing mysticism, or passionate eagerness to reform, avoiding dangerous extremes, and taking things as they are because they are comfortable, and lead to wealth, enjoyment, reputation-this, whether a true account or not of the theologian to whom we have referred (for our own part we are disposed to think his character more genuine and more lovable), is yet to be found under many eloquent defences of "Feeling for foothold through a blank pro found, Along with unborn people in strange lands." It may be that neither artist nor poet has as yet painted the beloved disciple as he was, and we may accept Mr. Browning's portraiture as, at any rate, a far closer approximation to the truth than the feminine gentleness with which he is popularly identified, or than M. Rénan's picture of an irritable and pretentious egotist. Apart from this, however, the "Death in the Desert" is worth studying in its bearing upon the mythical school of interpretation, and as a protest, we would fain hope, from Mr. Browning's own mind against the thought that because the love of God has been revealed in Christ, and has taught us the greatness of all true human love, therefore the faith, many fervent and scornful de- | of conceiving what he would have said nunciations of criticism and free thought. had he been reviewing the Leben Jesu, With a like minuteness, even to the de- still less to the belief (even poetically and gree of wearisomeness, does Mr. Brown- for a moment) that that development of ing pour his scorn, in "Mr. Sludge, the doubt entered into his apocalypse of the Medium," on the psuedo-spiritualism, future, or that he felt himself, even in with its acquiesence in imposture, its vision, hysterical craving for sensation, its delirious dotage, its dreams of a coming revelation of God through the agency of mahogany tables, which during the last ten years has in our country led captive its hundreds of silly women and sillier men, "laden with divers lusts," and in America has numbered its adherents by tens of thousands. In "Caliban upon Setebos," if it is more than the product of Mr. Browning's fondness for all abnormal forms of spiritual life, speculating among other things on the religious thoughts of a half brute-like savage, we must see a protest against the thought that man can rise by himself to true thoughts of God, and develop a pure theology out of his moral consciousness. So far it is a witness for the necessity of a revelation, either through the immediate action of the Light that lighteth every man, or that which has been given to mankind in spoken or written words, by the WORD that was in the beginning. In the "Death in the Desert," in like manner, we have another school of thought In one remarkable passage at the analyzed with a corresponding subtlety. close of "The Legend of Pornic," Mr. Dramatically, indeed, this seems to us Browning, speaking apparently in his own among the least successful of Mr. Brown-person, proclaims his belief in one great ing's portraits. Whatever we may think Christian doctrine, which all pantheistic of the possible feelings of St. John to- and atheistic systems formally repudiate, wards Hymenæus or Cerinthus, we can and which many semi-Christian thinkers hardly force our imagination to the task implicitly reject: "We ourselves make the love, and Christ was not." "The candid incline to surmise of late That the Christian faith may be false, I find; Begins to tell on the public mind, "I still, to suppose it true, for my part, See reasons and reasons: this, to begin- And, with this sense of the reality of the mystery of evil, there is also, forming the noblest element in his noblest works, if not an acceptance, in terms of Nicene theology, yet a clear and vivid apprehension of the glory of the "mystery of 66 godliness," which makes us welcome one who can so speak as not far from the kingdom of God," a brother in heart and hope. Thus, in the "Epistle of Karshish, the Arab Physician," travelling through Palestine, circa A.D. 70, the |