gone up from earth. Mr Browning, throughout the entire series of his writings, regards this world as a school or gymnasium, and also a place of test and trial for other lives to come. Therefore all the means of education in our school are precious-knowledge, beauty, passion, power all are precious, not absolutely, but with reference to the higher existence for which they are to prepare us. In proportion to the ardour with which we pursue these, and finding them insufficient, pass through them and beyond them, have we made them yield to us their worthiest service. Hence infinite desire, infinite aspiration, is the glory and virtue of our manhood; and through art, through science, through human love, we ascend unsatisfied to God. If, on the other hand, we rest in any attainment of knowledge, or love, or creation of beauty by art, accepting it for its own sake and as final, we have forfeited our high distinction as men, we have become beasts which graze in the paddock and do not Thus Mr Browning not counselling moderation, nor attempting to restrain the emotional ardour, the dilated passion of the early nineteenth-century literature of imagination, yet endeavours to convert this from a source of disease and despair into an educational instrument, a source of courage and hope, a pledge of futurity. Worldliness, a low content, a base prudence, the supine heart-these are the signs of fatal disaster to man's higher nature; to succeed perfectly on earth is to fail in heaven; to fail here, even as Paracelsus failed, is less piteous than to prosper and be at ease as Blougram prospered, extinguishing the light that was in him.

look up.

Secondly, what determines Mr Browning's place in the

F

history of our literature is that he represents militant transcendentalism, the transcendental movement at odds with the scientific. His acceptance of the Christian revelation, say rather his acceptance of the man Christ Jesus, lies at the very heart of Mr Browning's poetry; and in the mode of his accepting the Christ of history he approaches close to the spirit of Mr Maurice's theology. With an energy of intellect such as few poets have possessed he unites a spiritual ardour which if not associated on the one hand with an eager and combative intellect, on the other with strong human passions and affections, might have made Mr Browning a religious mystic; and he sets his intellect to defend the suggestions or intuitions of the spirit. In his "Caliban upon Setebos" the poet has, with singular and almost terrible force, represented what must be the natural theology of one who is merely an intellectual animal, devoid of spiritual cravings, sensibilities, and checks. It is these which discover to us not only the power of God but the love of God everywhere around us, and which enable us to perceive that there is a supreme instance or manifestation of God's love, which is very Christ.

Is

But what of the historical Jesus of Nazareth? He not disappearing from the world, criticized away and dissolved into a Christ-myth?

"We gazed our fill

With upturned faces on as real a Face

That, stooping from grave music and mild fire,
Took in our homage, made a visible place

Through many a depth of glory, gyre on gyre,
For the dim human tribute. Was this true?"

And is that divine face receding out of reach of our prayers

and praise into the darkness, until at last we shall lose it altogether? Mr Browning's answer implies some such creed as, if we were required to seek a label for it, we should name Christian Pantheism." He looks at the spectacle of the world and life as it plays, ocean-like, around each of us, and shows itself all alive and spiritual. The fishermen of Galilee told of a love of God which eighteen hundred years ago became flesh and dwelt with men; and this becomes credible because here and now we behold the miracle of an omnipresent and eternal love of God:

66

'Why, where's the need of Temple when the walls

O' the world are that? What use of swells and falls
From Levites' choir, priests' cries and trumpet calls?

"That one face, far from vanish rather grows,
Or decomposes but to recompose,

Become my universe that feels and knows !"

Since Mr Browning transcendentalism has fared ill in English literature. Poetry has been for a time Tannhäuser-like, in the cavern of Mount Hörsel, where the air is hot, and Dame Venus lies among shadows and heavy scents. It has tried to satiate its desire of pleasure with the play and colour of the flame of human passion, tending nowhither, but rising and falling and making a little centre of brightness and stir in the wide gloom and sadness of the world. Some of our poets talk of "art for art," and acquire dexterity in the handling of every implement of the jeweller's craft; only the jewels they cut and set are so tiny! Divorced from the spiritual world, and in the midst of a material world given up to low aims of selfinterest and pushing industrialism, what sphere is left

for poetry? Those terrible men of Ashdod, who sing hymns to Protoplasm, and kneel before the great God Evolution, "upward man and downward fish," have. they, quitting themselves like men, taken the ark of God? If any child of the prophetic tribe be brought forth, with slender infantile cry, must we not name him Ichabod? Or can it be that a much-perplexed Israelite wandering at wheat-harvest in the way of Beth-Shemesh, shall some morning hear the lowing of the kine, and lift up his eyes, and see the ark return, and rejoice to see it?

Meanwhile for the present one great imaginative writer represents at their highest the tendencies of our time, and concentrating her vision upon this earth, and the life of men, has seen in these good and evil, joy and anguish, terrors and splendours, as wonderful as ever appeared to any poet of transcendentalism. That the inductions of

science and the ethics of positivism transform but do not destroy what is spiritual in man, is demonstrated by the creations of "Romola" and "Daniel Deronda.”·

THE SCIENTIFIC MOVEMENT AND

LITERATURE.

To

ANY inquiry at the present day into the relations of modern scientific thought with literature must in great part be guided by hints, signs, and presages. The time has not yet come when it may be possible to perceive in complete outline the significance of science for the imagination and the emotions of men, but that the significance is large and deep we cannot doubt. Literature proper, indeed, the literature of power, as De Quincey named it, in distinction from the literature of knowledge, may, from one point of view, be described as essentially non-scientific, and even anti-scientific. ascertain and communicate facts is the object of science; to quicken our life into a higher consciousness through the feelings is the function of art. But though knowing and feeling are not identical, and a fact expressed in terms of feeling affects us as other than the same fact expressed in terms of knowing, yet our emotions rest on and are controlled by our knowledge. Whatever modifies our intellectual conceptions powerfully, in due time affects art powerfully. With its exquisite sensibilities, indifferent to nothing far off or near which can exalt a joy, or render pain more keen or prolonged, art is aroused by