tions avatars and embodiments-of universal facts, coming home to universal interests, united in marriage to other moods, situations, and crises, which we had thought altogether unrelated to them, and abundantly fertile in all kinds of new and helpful suggestions. Mr. Browning never touched a deeper or more inexhaustible thought than when he sung 'Flowers in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies ;— I should know what God and man is.' This is a parabolic description of Mr. Browning's method, but his flower in the crannied wall is some obscure life, some foiled aspiration, some perplexing incompleteness, some moment in a history which stands apart from other moments, something which, like the weed among the stones, tempts him to question it in the hope that it may have some secret to tell concerning the great whole of things,—a hope which gains a certain painful keenness from what seems its isolation from the whole, its perplexing apartness, and there its want of apparent signifi cance. For an example of this imaginative habit, a single poem will serve as well as many. In 'A Grammarian's Funeral' the poet contemplates a life which would strike the ordinary observer as pitifully incomplete, because lived apart from the main current of the life of the race. The dead man who is being carried to his grave has lived not with things or with thoughts, but with dead words. Through all his allotted years he has been what we call a mere Dryasdust; an accent or an etymology has been more to him than a revolution; and still when the end comes, 'So, with the throttling hands of Death at strife, Still, through the rattle, parts of speech were rife : He settled Hoti's business-let it be !—. Properly based Oun Gave us the doctrine of the enclytic De Here it will be seen is a miniature embodiment of a great human problem, or rather of two human problems-the problem of the inevitable incompleteness and fragmentariness of some lives, and of the same incompleteness and fragmentariness which in other lives is not inevitable but is voluntarily chosen, as it was by the dead grammarian. What is the explanation. of the first, what is the justification of the second? To both questions one answer can be returned. The earthly life is to be seen and understood and lived in the light cast on it by another and a larger life. Were earth all, even the completeness of earth whenever realised would be torturing to the hunger of the spirit that can only be satisfied by the illimitable. The speaker in 'The Last Ride Together,' says— 'Who knows what's fit for us. Had fate Have a bliss to die with, dim descried. I sink back shuddering from the quest. Earth being so good, would Heaven seem best? And on the other hand there is a certain satisfaction even in the incompleteness which compels us to look beyond it,— which testifies to a completeness of which it is a hint and a prophecy. The dying patriot on his way to the scaffold can rejoice over what man would call his failure, for its promise is larger, surer, and more glorious than the fulfilment of appar ent success. 'Thus I entered and thus I go ! In triumphs people have dropped down dead. This, too, was the inspiring thought of the dead grammarian, as interpreted by the singers of his rugged funeral hymn. They recognised this in him as his 'peculiar grace,' 'That before living he'd learn how to live; No end to learning: Earn the means first-God surely will contrive Others mistrust and say, 'But time escapes ! Live now or never!' He said, 'What's time? leave now for dogs and apes! '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, 'That low man goes on adding one to one, His hundred's soon hit. This high man, aiming at a million, Misses an unit. That has the world here-should he need the next, Let the world mind him ! This throws himself on God, and unperplext Seeking shall find him.' We have dwelt at some length upon Mr. Browning's attitude in this poem, because it is a specially characteristic one. It is also an attitude which differentiates his work very sharply from that of Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Swinburne. The latter, in all his more important volumes seems to doubt if not to deny the doctrine of a larger life beyond the present, and while the former implicitly accepts and in 'In Memoriam' explicitly affirms it, it can hardly be said that the apprehension of immortality is so vivid and vital as to mould and colour his work in the same way that it moulds and colours the work of Mr. Browning. For both Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Swinburne life answers its own questions; supplies the premises for all necessary conclusions; and their calculations are not complicated by the presence of an unknown quantity. Their position is more easily definable and their method more readily comprehensible than those of their contemporary, because their standard of values is more ordinary and therefore more understandable than his. When Mr. Tennyson pleads for order, the general reader knows what he means, and can appreciate the force of his plea; and when Mr. Swinburne pleads for liberty, he is in the same position: but Mr. Browning seems to render simple questions puzzling by introducing new and confusing elements. He is neither reactionary nor revolutionary; he cares neither for order nor for liberty as such, only as indications of a great reality of which they are but modes and conditions. Not to obey, not to disobey, but to live, to find somehow, either by obedience or rebellion, what life's meaning isthis, according to Mr. Browning is the great call to us. But how are we to live? how is life's true meaning to become known to us? Not, Mr. Browning seems to say, by observation, by curious analysis, by taking much thought, but rather by heeding and following the sudden impulse which we recognize as a true word from the unseen. This life is a sphere of twilight, and the twilight is more misleading than the darkness; but every now and then comes a gleam from the surrounding light, which at least shows us the new few steps of the true track. As he says in Cristina,' 'Oh, we're sunk enough here, God knows! Sure, tho' seldom, are denied us, When the spirit's true endowments Or the right way or the wrong way, To its triumph or undoing. There are flashes struck from midnights, There are fire-flames noondays kindle, Whereby piled-up honours perish, Which for once had play unstifled, Seems the whole work of a life-time That away the rest have trifled.' These moments, these flashes, these fire-flames are the revelations in this life of the true laws of the other life; the things which for the instant give us the vision of a higher and more enduring order than that of custom and convention-higher even than that of what we may have been taught to call duty. In at least one poem, The Statue and the Bust,' the foregone impulse was an impulse to what would be called a sin, but the lesson of the poem is that even a sin of instinctive ardour, of selfless passion may be less damning and deadening than the self-regarding virtue which narrows the soul and chills the heart. In the greater number of instances, however, the call of the supreme moment is to something which the world condemns much more bitterly than it ever condemns mere sin-to a splendid recklessness, an heroic imprudence, a divine disdain for the vulgar success of fame or pounds, shillings, and pence. The soul asserts itself,— it may be in a great love which calls into life all the possibilities both of rapture and of nobleness,—but in the same instant the world arrays herself against the soul, and whatsoever the issue may be, this at any rate is clear to the poet, that the world's success is the man's, the woman's failure. Thus, when Mr. Browning strives after an answer to the enigma of the age and the ages, he seeks it not in some wide. generalisation concerning law or order or progress or liberty; but rather follows the example of the scientific experimentalist, taking his men and women' one by one, hearing what each has to say, believing firmly that no crisis in any human life is of private interpretation, but that the one Spirit speaks to every human soul, and that any authentic message from the Heavens is a message not only to the individual but to the As the husband says in By the Fireside,'— race. 'How the world is made for each of us; |