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So, taking clay, he calls his shape thereout,
Cries ever, 'Now I have the thing I see':

Yet all the while goes changing what was wrought,
From falsehood like the truth, to truth itself.
How were it had he cried, 'I see no face,
No breast, no feet i' the ineffectual clay'?
Kather commend him that he clapped his hands,
And laughed, ‘It is my shape and lives again!'
Enjoyed the falsehood, touched it on to truth,
Until yourselves applaud the flesh indeed
In what is still flesh-imitating clay.

Right in you, right in him, such way be man's!
God only makes the live shape at a jet.
Will ye renounce this fact of creatureship?
The pattern on the Mount subsists no more,
Seemed awhile, then returned to nothingness;
But copies, Moses strove to make thereby
Serve still and are replaced as time requires:
By these make newest vessels, reach the type!
If ye demur, this judgment on your head,
Never to reach the ultimate, angels' law,
Indulging every instinct of the soul

There, where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing."

Browning has given varied and beautiful expressions to these ideas thoughout his poetry.

The soul must rest in nothing this side of the infinite. If it does rest in anything, however relatively noble that thing may be, whether art, or literature, or science, or theology, even, it declines in vitality — it torpifies. However great a conquest the combatant may achieve in any of these arenas, "striding away from the huge gratitude, his club shouldered, lion-fleece round loin and flank," he must be "bound on the next new labour, height o'er height ever surmounting destiny's decree!"1

"Rejoice that man is hurled From change to change unceasingly, His soul's wings never furled!"2

1 'Aristophanes' Apology,' p. 31, English ed.

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2 James Lee's Wife,' sect. 6.

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But this tabernacle-life, which should ever look ahead, has its claims which must not be ignored, and its standards which must not be too much above present conditions. Man must "fit to the finite his infinity" ('Sordello'). Life may be over-spiritual as well as over-worldly. "Let us cry, All good things are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!'" The figure the poet employs in 'The Ring and the Book' to illustrate the art process, may be as aptly applied to life itself—the greatest of all arts. The life-artist must know how to secure the proper degree of malleability in this mixture of flesh and soul. He must mingle gold with gold's alloy, and duly tempering both effect a manageable mass. There may be too little of alloy in earth-life as well as too much too little to work the gold and fashion it, not into a ring, but ring-ward. "On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round" ('Abt. Vogler'). "Oh, if we draw a circle premature, heedless of far gain, greedy for quick returns of profit, sure, bad is our bargain" (A Grammarian's Funeral ').

'An Epistle containing the Strange Medical Experiences of Karshish, the Arab Physician,' is one of Browning's most remarkable psychological studies. It may be said to polarize the idea, so often presented in his poetry, that doubt is a condition of the vitality of faith. In this poem, the poet has treated a supposed case of a spiritual knowledge "increased beyond the fleshly facultyheaven opened to a soul while yet on earth, earth forced on a soul's use while seeing heaven," a spiritual state, less desirable and far less favorable to the true fulfilment of the purposes of earthlife, than that expressed in the following lines from 'Easter Day':

"A world of spirit as of sense

Was plain to him, yet not too plain,
Which he could traverse, not remain
A guest in: - - else were permanent

Heaven on earth, which its gleams were meant
To sting with hunger for full light," etc.

1'Rabbi Ben Ezra.'

The Epistle is a subtle representation of a soul conceived with absolute spiritual standards, while obliged to live in a world where all standards are relative and determined by the circumstances and limitations of its situation.

The spiritual life has been too distinctly revealed for fulfilling aright the purposes of earth-life, purposes which the soul, while in the flesh, must not ignore, since, in the words of Rabbi Ben Ezra, "all good things are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul." The poem may also be said to represent what is, or should be, the true spirit of the man of science. In spite of what Karshish writes, apologetically, he betrays his real attitude throughout, towards the wonderful spiritual problem involved.

It is, as many of Browning's Monologues are, a double picture one direct, the other reflected, and the reflected one is as distinct as the direct. The composition also bears testimony to Browning's own soul-healthfulness. Though the spiritual bearing of things is the all-in-all, in his poetry, the robustness of his nature, the fulness and splendid equilibrium of his life, protect him against an inarticulate mysticism. Browning is, in the widest and deepest sense of the word, the healthiest of all living poets; and in general constitution the most Shakespearian.

What he makes Shakespeare say, in the Monologue entitled 'At the Mermaid,' he could say, with perhaps greater truth, in his own person, than Shakespeare could have said it:

"Have you found your life distasteful?

My life did and does smack sweet.
Was your youth of pleasure wasteful?
Mine I save and hold complete.
Do your joys with age diminish?
When mine fail me, I'll complain.
Must in death your daylight finish?
My sun sets to rise again.

I find earth not gray but rosy,

Heaven not grim but fair of hue.

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Do I stoop? I pluck a posy.

Do I stand and stare? All's blue."

It is the spirit expressed in these lines which has made his poetry so entirely constructive. With the destructive spirit he has no affinities. The poetry of despair and poets with the dumps he cannot away with.

Perhaps the most comprehensive passage in Browning's poetry, expressive of his ideal of a complete man under the conditions of earth-life, is found in Colombe's Birthday,' Act IV. Valence says of Prince Berthold:

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"He gathers earth's whole good into his arms, standing, as man, now, stately, strong and wise- marching to fortune, not surprised by her one great aim, like a guiding star above- which tasks strength, wisdom, stateliness, to lift his manhood to the height that takes the prize; a prize not near lest overlooking earth, he rashly spring to seize it nor remote, so that he rests upon his path content: but day by day, while shimmering grows shine, and the faint circlet prophesies the orb, he sees so much as, just evolving these, the stateliness, the wisdom, and the strength to due completion, will suffice this life, and lead him at his grandest to the grave."

Browning fully recognizes, to use an expression in his 'Fra Lippo Lippi,' fully recognizes "the value and significance of flesh." A healthy and well-toned spiritual life is with him the furthest removed from asceticism. To the passage from his 'Rabbi Ben Ezra' already quoted, "all good things are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul," should be added what David sings to Saul, in the poem entitled 'Saul.' Was the full physical life ever more beautifully sung?

"Oh! our manhood's prime vigour! no spirit feels waste, Not a muscle is stopped in its playing, nor sinew unbraced. Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock, The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool silver shock Of the plunge in a pool's living water, the hunt of the bear,

And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair.

And the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with gold dust divine,
And the locust-flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full draught of wine,
And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell
That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well.
How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy!"

Though this is said in the person of the beautiful shepherd-boy, David, whoever has lived any time with Browning, through his poetry, must be assured that it is also an expression of the poet's own experience of the glory of flesh. He has himself been an expression of the fullest physical life and now, in his five and seventieth year, since the 7th of last May, he preserves both mind and body in a magnificent vigor. If his soul had been lodged in a sickly, rickety body, he could hardly have written these lines from Saul.' Nor could he have written 'Caliban upon Setebos,' especially the opening lines: "Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best, flat on his belly in the pit's much mire, with elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin. And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush, and feels about his spine small eft-things course, run in and out each arm, and make him laugh and while above his head a pompion-plant, coating the cave-top as a brow its eye, creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard, and now a flower drops with a bee inside, and now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch, he looks out o'er yon sea which sunbeams cross and recross till they weave a spider-web (meshes of fire, some great fish breaks at times), and talks to his own self, howe'er he please, touching that other, whom his dam called God."

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There's a grand passage in 'Balaustion's Adventure: including a transcript from Euripides,' descriptive of Herakles as he returns, after his conflict with Death, leading back Alkestis, which shows the poet's sympathy with the physical. The passage is more valuable as revealing that sympathy, from the fact that it's one of his additions to Euripides:

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