By vivisection, at expense

Of half-an-hour and eighteen pence,

How brain secretes dog's soul, we'll see!'"

In his poem entitled 'Halbert and Hob' ('Dramatic Lyrics,' First Series), quoting from Shakespeare's King Lear,' "Is there a reason in nature for these hard hearts?" the poet adds, "O Lear, That a reason out of nature must turn them soft, seems clear !"

Mind is, with Browning, supernatural, but linked with, and restrained, and even enslaved by, the natural. The soul, in its education, that is, in its awakening, becomes more and more independent of the natural, and, as a consequence, more responsive to higher souls and to the Divine. All spirit is mutually attractive, and the degree of attractiveness results from the degree of freedom from the obstructions of the material, or the natural. Loving the truth implies a greater or less degree of that freedom of the spirit which brings it into sympathy with the true. "If ye abide in My word," says Christ (and we must understand by "word" His own concrete life, the word made flesh, and living and breathing), "if ye abide in My word" (that is, continue to live My life), "then are ye truly My disciples; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John viii. 32).

In regard to the soul's inherent possessions, its microcosmic potentialities, Paracelsus is made to say (and this may be taken, too, as the poet's own creed), "Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise from outward things, whate'er you may believe there is an inmost centre in us all, where truth abides in fulness; and around, wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in, 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."

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All possible thought is implicit in the mind, and waiting for "Seek within yourself," release waiting to become explicit. says Goethe, "and you will find everything; and rejoice that, without, there lies a Nature that says yea and amen to all you

have discovered in yourself." And Mrs. Browning, in the person of Aurora Leigh, writes: "The cygnet finds the water; but the man is born in ignorance of his element, and feels out blind at first, disorganized by sin in the blood,—his spirit-insight dulled and crossed by his sensations. Presently we feel it quicken in the dark sometimes; then mark, be reverent, be obedient, - for those dumb motions of imperfect life are oracles of vital Deity attesting the Hereafter. Let who says 'The soul's a clean white paper,' rather say, a palimpsest, a prophet's holograph defiled, erased, and covered by a monk's, the Apocalypse by a Longus! poring on which obscure text, we may discern perhaps some fair, fine trace of what was written once, some off-stroke of an alpha and omega expressing the old Scripture."

This "fair, fine trace of what was written once,” it was the mission of Christ, it is the mission of all great personalities, of all the concrete creations of Genius, to bring out into distinctness and vital glow. It is not, and cannot be, brought out,—and this fact is emphasized in the poetry of Browning, — it cannot be brought out, through what is born and resides in the brain: it is brought out, either directly or indirectly, by the attracting power of magnetic personalities, the ultimate, absolute personality being the God-man, Christ, Оeáv◊ρwños.

The human soul is regarded in Browning's poetry as a complexly organized, individualized divine force, destined to gravitate towards the Infinite. How is this force, with its numberless checks and counter-checks, its centripetal and centrifugal tendencies, best determined in its necessarily oblique way? How much earthly ballast must it carry, to keep it sufficiently steady, and how little, that it may not be weighed down with materialistic heaviness? How much certainty must it have of its course, and how much uncertainty, that it may shun the "torpor of assurance," and not lose the vigor which comes of a dubious and obstructed road, "which who stands upon is apt to doubt if it's indeed a

1 The Ring and the Book,' The Pope, v. 1853.

road."1

"Pure faith indeed," says Bishop Blougram, to Gigadibs, the literary man, "you know not what you ask! naked belief in God the Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent, sears too much the sense of conscious creatures, to be borne. It were the seeing him, no flesh shall dare. Some think, Creation's meant to show him forth: I say, it's meant to hide him all it can, and that's what all the blessed Evil's for. Its use in time is to environ us, our breath, our drop of dew, with shield enough against that sight till we can bear its stress. Under a vertical sun, the exposed brain and lidless eye and disimprisoned heart less certainly would wither up at once, than mind, confronted with the truth of Him. But time and earth case-harden us to live; the feeblest sense is trusted most the child feels God a moment, ichors o'er the place, plays on and grows to be a man like us. With me, faith means perpetual unbelief kept quiet like the snake 'neath Michael's foot, who stands calm just because he feels it writhe." 2

There is a remarkable passage to the same effect in ‘Paracelsus,' in which Paracelsus expatiates on the "just so much of doubt as bade him plant a surer foot upon the sun-road."

And in Easter Day':

"You must mix some uncertainty

With faith, if you would have faith be.”

And the good Pope in 'The Ring and the Book,' alluding to the absence of true Christian soldiership, which is revealed by Pompilia's case, says: "Is it not this ignoble confidence, cowardly hardihood, that dulls and damps, makes the old heroism impossible? Unless . . . what whispers me of times to come? What if it be the mission of that age my death will usher into life, to shake this torpor of assurance from our creed, reintroduce the doubt discarded, bring the formidable danger back we drove long ago to the distance and the dark?"

True healthy doubt means, in Browning, that the spiritual nature is sufficiently quickened not to submit to the conclusions of the insulated intellect. It will reach out beyond them, and assert itself, whatever be the resistance offered by the intellect. Mere doubt, without any resistance from the intuitive, non-discursive side of our nature, is the dry-rot of the soul. The spiritual functions are "smothered in surmise." Faith is not a matter of blind belief, of slavish assent and acceptance, as many no-faith people seem to regard it. It is what Wordsworth calls it, "a passionate intuition," and springs out of quickened and refined sentiment, out of inborn instincts which are as cultivable as are any other elements of our complex nature, and which, too, may be blunted beyond a consciousness of their possession. And when one in this latter state denies the reality of faith, he is not unlike one born blind denying the reality of sight.

A reiterated lesson in Browning's poetry, and one that results from his spiritual theory, is, that the present life is a tabernaclelife, and that it can be truly lived only as a tabernacle-life; for only such a life is compatible with the ever-continued aspiration and endeavor which is a condition of, and inseparable from, spiritual vitality.

Domizia, in the tragedy of 'Luria,' is made to say:

"How inexhaustibly the spirit grows!

One object, she seemed erewhile born to reach
With her whole energies and die content,

So like a wall at the world's edge it stood,

With naught beyond to live for, is that reached? -
Already are new undream'd energies

Outgrowing under, and extending farther

To a new object; - there's another world!"

The dying John in 'A Death in the Desert,' is made to say:

"I say that man was made to grow, not stop;
That help he needed once, and needs no more,
Having grown up but an inch by, is withdrawn:

For he hath new needs, and new helps to these.'
This imports solely, man should mount on each
New height in view; the help whereby he mounts,
The ladder-rung his foot has left, may fall,
Since all things suffer change save God the Truth.
Man apprehends him newly at each stage
Whereat earth's ladder drops, its service done;

And nothing shall prove twice what once was proved.”

And again :

"Man knows partly but conceives beside,

Creeps ever on from fancies to the fact,

And in this striving, this converting air
Into a solid he may grasp and use,

Finds progress, man's distinctive mark alone,
Not God's, and not the beasts': God is, they are,

Man partly is and wholly hopes to be.

Such progress could no more attend his soul

Were all it struggles after found at first

And guesses changed to knowledge absolute,
Than motion wait his body, were all else
Than it the solid earth on every side,

Where now through space he moves from rest to rest.
Man, therefore, thus conditioned, must expect

He could not, what he knows now, know at first;

What he considers that he knows to-day,

Come but to-morrow, he will find misknown;
Getting increase of knowledge, since he learns
Because he lives, which is to be a man,
Set to instruct himself by his past self:
First, like the brute, obliged by facts to learn,
Next, as man may, obliged by his own mind,
Bent, habit, nature, knowledge turned to law.
God's gift was that man should conceive of truth
And yearn to gain it, catching at mistake,
As midway help till he reach fact indeed.
The statuary ere he mould a shape
Boasts a like gift, the shape's idea, and next

The aspiration to produce the same;