And no condemnation could have been more awful, for nature has betrayed and ruined us if we rest in it; betrayed and ruined us, unless it sends us onward unsatisfied to God.

And what are Mr. Browning's chief doctrines on the subject of art? No poet probably has so fully interpreted the artistic spirit as it finds expression in poetry (Aprile); sculpture (Jules); painting (Andrea del Sarto Fra Lippo Lippi, Pictor Ignotus); and Music (Abt Vogler, A toccata of Galuppi, Hugues of Saxe Gotha); and as we found it quite in harmony with Mr. Tennyson's feeling for law, that his imagination should be impressed by the processes and results of science, so it is quite in harmony with Mr. Browning's feeling for enthusiasms and passions that he should enter profoundly into the nature of art, and the kind of genius which it requires. Now, Mr. Browning brings out his doctrines on art, perhaps unconsciously, by the remarkable contrast between those poems which represent the spirit of the artist and the spirit of the connoisseur. No one has so profoundly exposed the worldliness of the connoisseur, or virtuoso, who, feeling none of the unsatisfied aspirations of the artist, rests in the visible products of art, and looks for nothing beyond them. "The bishop orders his tomb at St. Praxed's," and "My Last Duchess," and "Monsignor" in "Pippa Passes," will be remembered by every reader of Mr. Browning.

The unbelieving and worldly spirit of the dying bishop, his sense of the vanity of the world simply

because the world is passing out of his reach, the regretful memory of the pleasures of his youth, the envious spite towards Gandolf, who robbed him of the best position in St. Praxed's for a tomb, and the dread lest his reputed sons should fail to carry out his designs, are united with a perfect appreciation of Renaissance art, and a luxurious satisfaction, even on a death-bed, in the splendour of voluptuous form and colour. There is a profound sadness in the poem. The true glory of art is, that in its creation there exist desires and aspirations which can never be satisfied on earth, but which generate new desires and new aspirations, by which the spirit mounts to God Himself. The artist (Mr. Browning loves to insist on this point) who can realize in marble, or colour, or music, his ideal, has missed the true gain of art. In "Pippa Passes," the regeneration of Jules the sculptor's art turns on his finding out that in the very perfection he had attained lies ultimate failure. And one entire poem-" Andrea del Sarto❞—has been devoted to the development of this idea. Andrea is "the faultless painter;" no line of his drawing ever goes astray; he can express perfectly all that is in his mind; but for this very reason, precisely because he is "the faultless painter," his art is deficient of the highest qualities of art. A man's aim in art should be higher than anything he can possibly effect

"A man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a Heaven for? all is silver-gray, Placid and perfect with my art-the worse."

And he recognises his superior in Raphael, whose execution falls far below his own.

"Yonder's a work, now, of that famous youth,

The Urbinate who died five years ago.
('Tis copied, George Vasari sent it me.)
Well, I can fancy how he did it all,

Pouring his soul, with kings and popes to see,
Reaching that Heaven might so replenish him,
Above and thro' his art-for it gives way;
That arm is wrongly put-and there again—
A fault to pardon in the drawing's lines,
Its body so to speak: its soul is right,
He means right—that a child may understand.
Still, what an arm! and I could alter it.

But all the play, the insight and the stretch-
Out of me! out of me!"

The true artist is ever sent through and beyond his art unsatisfied to God. Tears start into the eyes of Abt. Vogler, who has been extemporizing on his musical instrument, because now in the silence he feels the beauty of that palace of music which he reared, and which is gone never to be recalled. There is in the silence a sense of loss, vacancy and failure, but the failure generates a higher aspiration, and the musician reaches upward to God.

"Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineffable Name? Builder and maker Thou of houses not made with hands! What, have fear of change from Thee who art ever the same?

Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that Thy power expands?

There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before ;

The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;

What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;

On the earth, the broken arcs ; in the heaven, a perfect round.

“All we have will or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist; Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good nor

power

Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.

The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that He heard it once ; we shall hear it by-and-by.”

And once more we find a full confession of Mr. Browning's creed with respect to art in the poem entitled, “Old Pictures in Florence." He sees the ghosts of the early Christian Masters, whose work has never been duly appreciated, standing sadly by the mouldering Italian frescos; and when a friend observes, that if he knew what he ought to praise he would praise it, Mr. Browning answers that the glory of Christian Art lies in its rejecting a limited perfection such as that of Greek Art, the subject of which was finite, and which taught men to submit, and in its daring to be faulty, faulty because its subject was full of infinite hopes and fears, and because it would teach men to aspire.

A large number of Mr. Browning's poems have love for their subject; and here again we find the same recurring thoughts. In Mr. Tennyson's poems

which treat of love, the temptation to which the characters are exposed is commonly the indulgence of passion in violation of the law of conscience or of duty. In Mr. Browning's, the temptation almost invariably is to sacrifice the passion, either to prudential motives, fear of public opinion, or through supineness of spirit. As the artistic enthusiasm carries the artist through his art to God, so any intense passion, an "outlaw of time and space," gives rise to infinite aspirations and desires, which form the true preparation for a future life.

At a salôn in Paris, a lady (her husband is somewhere playing at whist) meets her old lover—a literary man who has been successful, has a chair in the Academy, and is himself also married; and she reminds him of a morning ten years ago, when at the sea-side, her arm in his, he had all but confessed his love some prudential motive, or feeling of doubt or shame, at the last moment restraining him. Four men and women who might have lived true lives are suffering for that cowardice.

"Now I may speak! you fool, for all

Your lore! WHO made things plain in vain?
What was the sea for? What, the grey

Sad church, that solitary day,
Crosses and graves and swallows' call?

"Was there nought better than to enjoy?

No feat, which, done, would make time break,
And let us pent-up creatures through

Into eternity, our due?

No forcing earth teach Heaven's employ?