And refer myself to THEE, instead of him, There is indeed one remarkable passage in one of his latest works, "La Saisiaz" (1878), wherein he plunges into the unfathomable abyss of the Everlasting No; but from this he retrieves himself with triumphant emphasis in the Everlasting Yes. For the rest, the devout and hopeful Christian faith, explicitly or implicitly affirmed in such poems as "Saul," "Karshish," "Cleon," "Caliban upon Setebos," "A Death in the Desert,” “Instans Tyrannus,” "Rabbi Ben Ezra," "Prospice," the "Epilogue," and throughout that stupendous monumental work, "The Ring and the Book," must surely be clear as noonday to even the most purblind vision. To summarise: I look up to Browning as one of the very few men known to me by their works who, with most cordial energy and invincible resolution, have lived thoroughly throughout the whole of their being, to the uttermost verge of all their capacities, in his case truly colossal; lived and wrought thoroughly in sense and soul and intellect; lived at home in all realms of nature and human nature, art and literature: whereas nearly all of us are really alive in but a small portion of our so much smaller beings, and drag wearily toward the grave our for the most part dead selves, dead from the suicidal poison of misuse and atrophy of disuse. Confident and rejoicing in the storm and stress of the struggle, he has conquered life instead of being conquered by it; a victory so rare as to be almost unique, especially among poets in these latter days. When the end comes, which must come, he can well say with his friend Landor, that "indomitable old Roman" : "I strove with none, for none was worth my strife; I warmed both hands before the fire of Life ; It fails, and I am ready to depart!" And further, in the consummation of the faith of a lifetime, sing to the world : "Must in death your daylight finish? My sun sets to rise again." And to his Beloved gone before : “O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again, And with God be the rest!" "THE RING AND THE BOOK" CERTAIN rare works of literature, like others of art and philosophy, appear too gigantic to have been wholly wrought out each by the one man who we yet know did accomplish it unaided. Such a work reminds us of a great cathedral, which, even if ultimately finished in accordance with the plans of the supreme architect who designed it, could not be completed under his own supervision or during his own lifetime, being too vast and elaborate for fulfilment in a single generation. And as such a colossal work "The Ring and the Book" has always impressed me; and, indeed, without straining comparison, one may pursue with regard to it the suggestion of a great Gothic cathedral. For here truly we find the analogues of the soaring towers and pinnacles, the multitudinous niches with their statues, the innumerable intricate traceries, the gargoyles wildly grotesque; and, within, the many-coloured light through the stained windows with the red and purple of blood predominant, the long pillared echoing aisles, the altar with its piteous crucifix and altar-piece of the Last Judgment, the organ and the choir pealing their Miserere and De Profundis and In Excelsis Deo, the side chapels, the confessionals, the fantastic woodcarvings, the tombs with their effigies sculptured supine; and beneath, yet another chapel, as of death, and the solemn sepulchral crypts. The counterparts of all this and all these, I dare affirm, may veritably be found in this immense and complicate structure, whose foundations are so deep and whose crests are so lofty. Only, as a Gothic cathedral has been termed a petrified forest, we must image this work as a vivified cathedral, thrilling hot swift life through all its "marble nerves" "It interpenetrates my granite mass; Through tangled roots and trodden clay doth pass They breathe a spirit up from their obscurest bowers.' We have all often read the anecdote of Newton, so told as to imply that the discovery of the law of gravitation was owing to the accidental arrest of his attention by the accidental fall of an apple. But apples have fallen by myriads ever since Eve was tempted to eat of one in Eden; yet we do not learn that any of them ever suggested that law until, in the garden at Woolsthorpe, one fell into a mind already teeming with meditations to the very verge of the discovery, and prepared to crystallise round any appropriate fact that should fall among them. Just so a certain square old yellow Book, a hundred and sixty-seven years old, small quarto size, with crumpled vellum covers, part print, part manuscript-print three-fifths, written supplement the rest-must have passed unsuggestive or unproductive through very many hands, and might have passed through millions more without suggesting anything better than a little romance or a magazine article; but a great poet one fierce June day (in 1865, as I read) picks it up for a lira, eightpence English just, from among the old and new trash of a stall on a step of the Ricardi Palace in the Square of San Lorenzo, Florence. It thus falls into a heart and mind full of learning and knowledge, thought, insight, genius, intense human sympathy, which all leap to crystallise around it in most living crystallisation; and we have as result this stupendous poem, stupendous far more by quality than by quantity, though numbering over twenty thousand lines; a work destined to rank among the world's masterpieces-"The Ring and the Book." Mr. Swinburne, in his fine Critical Essay on George Chapman, devotes several pages to the vindication of Browning from the common charge of obscurity; pages not really discursive, for they shed clear light upon the proper main theme. I am loth to mutilate such admirably proportioned eloquence; but as it appears to me no less just than eloquent in its insistence on certain dominant qualities of Browning's genius, I cannot refrain from citing a few of its salient sentences, while commending the whole to the study of the reader; for why put poorly in one's own words what has been already put richly in another's? "Now, if there is any great quality more perceptible than another in Mr. Browning's intellect, it is his decisive and incisive faculty of thought, his sureness and intensity of perception, his rapid and trenchant resolution of aim. To charge him with obscurity is about as accurate as to call Lynceus purblind, or complain of the sluggish action of the telegraphic wire. He is something too much the reverse of obscure; he is too brilliant and subtle for the ready reader of a ready writer to follow with |