most with the relation of the individual soul to the source of its life-to the centre of the universe,―realized within. This deals with the relation of the soul to the life of God manifested in others; it teaches us that when we can say only My Father, not Our Father, we cannot enter into the mind of God, nor pray aright; that if we are not quite in darkness, we are only in the moonlight; if we are touching the hem of Christ's garment, we have not entered with Him the transfiguring cloud; we are not wrapt in that glory, we are only on the verge of light. And as in Easter Day, he forces us to face the thoughts, and see whether we really feel what we supposed we did, he shows us we cannot do without God; as we found in the one, that the love of God glorifies nature, and alone draws us into loving sympathy; so in Christmas Eve we find that same love it is, which, being shed abroad in our hearts, enables us to love man, to lose sight of what is merely phenomenal and faulty, and to go down to those deeper depths, where we meet in truest sympathy in the sense of a common need, a common aspiration, a common love. We have been sentimentalizing perhaps about love, bestowing our charity in inverse proportion to people's nearness to us. Browning brings us, as it were, face to face with our complacent religious selves, and he bids us then follow, cling to Christ, say with our hearts, “Where Thou goest, I will go." Then we listen to those words, "Where two or three are gathered together, there am I"-present, with infinite compassion and love; not with the refined and cultivated and aesthetic, but with those who are in your eyes ugly and ignorant and narrow; in that miserable little Bethel, out of which you have dashed with contempt; present, because their souls are seeking Me, and longing for the light, and are therefore growing up into it, though their life does seem so dreary and dark to you; present with those you despise for utter want of æsthetic sense. Present in the great cathedral, with those too whom you regard as superstitious, because the emotions of their souls are expressed in the ascending incense, the thrilling music, the pictured forms. Yes, even with him who knows Me not as a living Presence, but desires truth; who has with toilsome steps climbed the mountain-tops, that he might dwell in a region of pure light, and who is starving amidst the snows; even to him I come breathing warmth and love, and therefore life. None are cast out of My Presence; if you cast out from your love any human soul, you must let go then of the hem of that garment from whence virtue goes out to all suffering humanity. There is a musical trilogy which corresponds with the three poems on which I have previously dwelt. And here I may perhaps remark that I know of no modern poet at least, in whom art is so unified as in Browning; the scenery and sound so harmonized with the thought. He owes his excellence in this partly to his familiarity with Greek drama, especially with Eschylus. Comparing the three poems, we may say Saul corresponds to Hugues of Suxe-Gotha; Caliban, the debased, the bestial, to the Toccata of Galuppi; Abt Vogler to Lazarus, the glorified, spiritualized man. The central poem, Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha, represents the truly human, the soul seeking to interpret the perplexed music of earth, arguing, disputing, contending, in the faith that there is a meaning in all, though the final answer is delayed. The very sound is given of the perplexed intricate fugue, with its many melodies, crossing, interpenetrating, and moving on together. "One says his say with a difference ; More of expounding, explaining; All now is wrangle, abuse, and vociference; Now there's a truce, all's subdued, self-restraining, Five, though, stands out all the stiffer hence. Est fuga, volvitur rota, On we drift: where looms the dim port? One, Two, Three, Four, Five, contribute their quota ; So your fugue broadens and thickens, And the same thought of the perplexities of life is repeated to the sight in the intricate mouldings of the roof. Our scene is a mediæval church, in which the musician lingers; the dim lights are growing dimmer as the sexton extinguishes one after another, and the golden cherubs which reflect some of that feeble light are partly hidden by the cobwebs. "There! see our roof, its gilt moulding and groining The answer does not come, the meaning cannot be evolved, the vision of glory is only dimly seen through the symbols of earth. "So we o'ershroud stars and roses, Cherub and trophy and garland; Nothings grow somethings which quietly closes Heaven's earnest eye; not a glimpse of the far land Gets through our comments and glozes." And as the last candle by which he had been able to interpret the music, sinks in its socket, he stumbles down the dangerous staircase, out of the dark church into the moonlight silence, whither we cannot follow; the lights of earth extinguished for him, the restless questioning over. A Toccata of Galuppi's corresponds with Caliban. Here we have the low, sensuous, the fleshly school, with no outlook beyond the amusements of the immediate present; the scene, a ball-room in Venice. We hear the light foolish talk, scarcely lulled as the musician begins. “I can always leave off talking when I hear a master play!” For the roar of the fugue we have a music like the thin chirp of a cricket, wonderfully imitated in the monosyllabic verse, a sort of grownup baby language, full of affectations; a silly, inane music which brings before us a ghastly vision of dead men and women, for whom life had no meaning at all. "Did young people take their pleasure, when the sea was warm in May? Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to midday, When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow, do you say? Then they left you for their pleasure, till in due time, one by one, And lastly there is Abt Vogler, the music of faith grand and mighty, which evokes the sense of spiritual presences, "Claiming each slave of the sound at a touch, as when Solomon willed building up a world of real harmony-a world true because ideal. We are no longer shut in, as at Saxe-Gotha, in a church in which the lights are dying out one by one. We are watching a glorious cathedral grow before our eyes, and the glory is ever spreading, and the light is ever increasing, ascending higher and higher, until earth and heaven become one, and the bounds of space and time are lost in an eternal present. "For higher still and higher (as a runner tips with fire When a great illumination surprises a festal night), Outlining round and round Rome's dome from space to spire Up, the pinnacled glory reached, and the pride of my soul was in sight.” The lights are climbing from earth to the sky; we see terrace above terrace shine forth, and the lights are spirits ascending heavenward, even as in Jacob's vision of the angels, ascending ere they descended, and forming, as they lose themselves in the sky, a vision of a Church triumphant, such as Dante beheld in Paradise. "And another would mount and march like the excellent minion he was, Raising my rampired walls of gold as transparent as glass, And the music ascends up and up, until the sense of effort is gone, for the highest pinnacle of earthly endeavour is reached, and then the soul sinks into the infinite and is lost, yet lives in the life and light of heaven. "The emulous heaven yearned down, made effort to reach the earth, As the earth had done her best, in my passion to scale the sky: For earth had attained to heaven, there was no more near nor far." All is then seen not as it is to sense, but as it exists truly in the Divine idea, one day to come forth from the region of being to the region of consciousness. All the possibilities, which to us are not, but which truly are, the Divine ideas, one day to become existent in the visible. "Nay more; for there wanted not who walked in the glare and glow, Furnished for ages to come, when a kindlier wind should blow, Lured now to begin and live." All that too is seen as existing, which to us was, and is not, but which truly is. "Or else the wonderful dead who have passed through the body and gone, But were back once more to breathe in an old world worth their new." And as the vision of the Infinite opens around, it becomes clear that no energy is lost, no true effort vain, for all life and energy are Divine, "evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound." The music of a holy life may die out on earth, but it exists for ever in the Eternal, the Unchanging, because it is the Divine idea. "All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist; The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, Enough that he heard it once we shall hear it by and by." But is it true, as some say, that the teaching of these earlier poems is superseded by that of the later, and so the poet has destroyed his own work? To me it seems that in the later poems there is a more restful faith than in the earlier; a belief less vehement, and therefore less struggling. Is there not a deep significance in the beautiful story of Alcestis (Balaustion's Adventure); a real consciousness which needs. not proof in Prospice, in some passages of the Ring and the Book, in A Wall, and in the beautiful prologue and epilogue of Fifine. The vehement questionings of La Saisiaz, what are they but the cries of a present grief, which we all utter, as we see some loved friend pass out of sight. We cry to the whirlwind, "Wherefore? whereto?" answer comes, but the heart replies. "Traversed heart must tell its story uncommented on: no less No In this present "fe as fare, event misfortune's worst assaults Er the death-pang to the -learning what is love indeed! meal may carry high shmesh death her emp unspilled, g that it be with knowledre, life's loss drop by drop distilled, I want that in the later poems he cares less to formulate. As we climb higher and cur vision willens, that which once seemed the whole truth now takes its place as pert only of a larger, more embracing unity. In our in lividual lives, as in the world's history, we follow the sun in his course; but horizons change, and we never reach the land of light; truth recales, but it is to tempt us onward; the crystal spheres of the world's childhood are broken, and if for a moment the soul £utters down and stands panting upon some solid cliff, she rises thence having plumed her pinions for a longer fight; she returns again and again only to renew her strength, and at last, in all the might of a great trust in the All-good, she wings her fight into the infinite unknown. This utter trust is proved only when we can go forth, as the faithful of old, not knowing whither we ga "truth is truth in each degree; Thunderpealed by God to nature, whispered by my soul to me. Nay, the weakness turns to strength and triumphs in a strength beyond: I shall no more dare to mimic such response in futile speech, Pass off human lisp as echo of the sphere-song out of reach.” Only a learner, Quick one or slow one, Just a discerner, I would teach no one.” (Pisgah Sights.) The lesson taught in the earlier poem of Saul is repeated in the latest, that the Divine love shed abroad in our hearts is the witness for a Divine love which we can trust for ever and ever; and it is the strength of this inner consciousness, the witness of the Spirit, that has enabled the poet-seers of all ages to sing loud above the storm-waves their Gloria in excelsis. "Soul that canst soar! Body may slumber, Body shall cumber Soul-flight no more. "Waft of soul's wing! What lies above? (Pisgah Sights.) |