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This perfect, clear perception — which is truth;
A baffling and perverting carnal mesh
Blinds it, and makes all error: and 'to know'
Rather consists in opening out a way
Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape,
Than in effecting entry for a light

Supposed to be without. Watch narrowly
The demonstration of a truth, its birth,

And you trace back the effluence to its spring

And source within us, where broods radiance vast,

To be elicited ray by ray, as chance

Shall favour: chance

for hitherto, your sage

Even as he knows not how those beams are born,
As little knows he what unlocks their fount;
And men have oft grown old among their books
To die, case-hardened in their ignorance,

Whose careless youth had promised what long years
Of unremitted labour ne'er performed:

While, contrary, it has chanced some idle day,
That autumn-loiterers just as fancy-free

As the midges in the sun, have oft given vent
To truth - produced mysteriously as cape
Of cloud grown out of the invisible air.
Hence, may not truth be lodged alike in all,
The lowest as the highest? some slight film
The interposing bar which binds it up,
And makes the idiot, just as makes the sage
Some film removed, the happy outlet whence
Truth issues proudly? See this soul of ours!
How it strives weakly in the child, is loosed
In manhood, clogged by sickness, back compelled
By age and waste, set free at last by death:
Why is it, flesh enthralls it or enthrones?
What is this flesh we have to penetrate?
Oh, not alone when life flows still do truth
And power emerge, but also when strange chance
Ruffles its current; in unused conjuncture,
When sickness breaks the body-hunger, watching,
Excess, or languor—oftenest death's approach —

Peril, deep joy, or woe. One man shall crawl
Through life, surrounded with all stirring things,
Unmoved and he goes mad; and from the wreck
Of what he was, by his wild talk alone,

You first collect how great a spirit he hid.
Therefore set free the spirit alike in all,
Discovering the true laws by which the flesh
Bars in the spirit!...

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The sacred knowledge, here and there dispersed
About the world, long lost or never found.
And why should I be sad, or lorn of hope?
Why ever make man's good distinct from God's?
Or, finding they are one, why dare mistrust?
Who shall succeed if not one pledged like me?
Mine is no mad attempt to build a world
Apart from His, like those who set themselves
To find the nature of the spirit they bore,

And, taught betimes that all their gorgeous dreams
Were only born to vanish in this life,

Refused to fit them to this narrow sphere,

But chose to figure forth another world

And other frames meet for their vast desires,

Still, all a dream! Thus was life scorned; but life

Shall yet be crowned: twine amaranth! I am priest!"

And again :

"In man's self arise

August anticipations, symbols, types

Of a dim splendour ever on before,

In that eternal circle run by life:

For men begin to pass their nature's bound,

And find new hopes and cares which fast supplant

Their proper1 joys and griefs; and outgrow all
The narrow creeds of right and wrong, which fade
Before the unmeasured thirst for good; while peace
Rises within them ever more and more.

1 In the sense of the Latin proprius, peculiar, private, personal.

Such men are even now upon the earth,

Serene amid the half-formed creatures round,

Who should be saved by them and joined with them."

In the last three verses is indicated the doctrine of the regenerating power of exalted personalities, so prominent in Browning's poetry, and which is treated in the next paper.

There is no tabula rasa doctrine in these passages, nor in any others, in the poet's voluminous works; and of all men of great intellect and learning (it is always a matter of mere insulated intellect), born in England since the days of John Locke, no one, perhaps, has been so entirely untainted with this doctrine as Robert Browning. It is a doctrine which great spiritual vitality (and that he early possessed), reaching out, as it does, beyond all experience, beyond all transformation of sensations, and all conclusions of the discursive understanding, naturally and spontaneously rejects. It simply says, "I know better," and there an end.

The great function of the poet, as poet, is, with Browning, to open out a way whence the imprisoned splendor may escape, not to effect entry for a light supposed to be without; to trace back the effluence to its spring and source within us, where broods radiance vast, to be elicited ray by ray.

In Fifine at the Fair,' published thirty-seven years after 'Paracelsus,' is substantially the same doctrine :

"Truth inside, and outside, truth also; and between
Each, falsehood that is change, as truth is permanence.
The individual soul works through the shows of sense,
(Which, ever proving false, still promise to be true)
Up to an outer soul as individual too;

And, through the fleeting, lives to die into the fixed,

And reach at length 'God, man, or both together mixed.'"

In his poem entitled 'Popularity,' included in his "fifty men and women," the speaker, in the monologue, "draws" his "true poet," whom he knows, if others do not; who, though he renders,

or stands ready to render, to his fellows, the supreme service of ` opening out a way whence the imprisoned splendor of their souls may escape, is yet locked safe from end to end of this dark world.

Though there may be, in his own time, no "reapers reaping early in among the bearded barley" and "piling sheaves in uplands airy" who hear his song, he holds the future fast, accepts the coming ages' duty, their present for this past. This true, creative poet, whom the speaker calls "God's glow-worm," creative in the sense of revealing, whose inmost centre, where truth abides in fulness, has that freedom of responsiveness to the divine which makes him the revealer of it to men, plays the part in the world of spirit which, in the material world was played by the fisher who, first on the coast of Tyre the old, fished up the purple-yielding murex. Until the precious liquor, filtered by degrees, and refined to proof, is flasked and priced, and salable at last, the world stands aloof. But when it is all ready for the market, the small dealers, "put blue into their line," and outdare each other in azure feats by which they secure great popularity, and, as a result, fare sumptuously; while he who fished the murex up was unrecognized, and fed, perhaps, on porridge.

POPULARITY.

I.

STAND still, true poet that you are!

I know you; let me try and draw you.
Some night you'll fail us: when afar
You rise, remember one man saw you,
Knew you, and named1 a star!

II.

My star, God's glow-worm! Why extend
That loving hand of His which leads you,
Yet locks you safe from end to end

Of this dark world, unless He needs you,
Just saves your light to spend?

1 Announced.

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