structure of belief entirely rests on two postulates, the existence of the soul and the existence of God. He attempts to prove neither, because to him they are self-evident. This point of individual testimony is dwelt upon. Browning takes self (as in Rabbi Ben Ezra) as the centre of its universe and the judge of all phenomena, and self-development as self's tendency and eventual aim. To grant these two personalities, the subjective and the objective, or soul and God, is an enormous assumption, though Browning never questions either. This is not because he shrinks from probing for truth, but because he was born a poet, and therefore a mystic. Accordingly, he affirms that, to the extent of his only two assumptions, he knows1 that "which passeth knowledge." All doctrine inferential therefrom is matter for 'surmise,' and that is the peculiar province of Browning's searching intellect. The basis of his belief in immortality is that life is only explicable as probation. It is the inexplicableness, rather than the injustice, of life for which he needs the hope of a different hereafter. Yet, looking at life, he decides that, were its conditions final, evil outweighs good. The positivist's social immortality is inconsistent with the personal soul's conception of the personal God. Successively, Browning tries life, as he knows it, with every key but that of probation and immortality, and finds that

1 Cp. Abt Vogler's

"The others may reason and welcome; 'tis we musicians" (poets) "know."

not one of them opens the door. Afterwards, he shifts his ground, and approaches his problem from the other side. Conceding the existence of personal immortality, he vindicates the uncertainty on the subject that is man's lot here. This vindication is carried on in an internal debate, which Browning endeavours to make as objective as possible in order that its result shall not be impeachable as the offspring of sentiment, the easy creation of wishes. Expressed in a more argumentative form, the substance of what 'Reason' says is that of A Death in the Desert, Pisgah-Sights, II., and Fears and Scruples. It proves the value of ignorance in developing fortitude which comes of faith, morality which comes of volition, activity which comes of responsibility, and self-reliance which comes of the absence of authority.

La Saisiaz suffers from the personal directness which Browning disavows. The poem is so ratiocinative, that it needs characterisation to raise it generally to the imaginative level. The serpentining trochaics add to the strain on the attention, and what with the impetuous leaps, and only half expressed links, of its thought, it is one of Browning's hardest works.

The Two Poets of Croisic is enclosed between two exquisite lyrics. The one love of the personal life is the subject of the first (called Appearances in the Selections). The second (called A Tale in the Selections), is a story concerning a poet and his lyre. It brims over with playful tenderness, and tears—we need not ask

P

for whom are in the voice that tells us how once in

the poet's life, the

"string that made

‘Love' sound soft was snapt in twain.”

The Two Poets of Croisic unearths two personages, one of the sixteenth century, the other of the eighteenth. Each made a rocket-like ascent in

Paris, fizzed awhile, and descended like rocket-sticks. Browning describes himself as sitting over a shipwood fire, and telling what his fancy sees therein. He conjures up the bleak Breton fishing - village, Croisic, with its memoirs of Druidical savagery. His first Croisickese poet is René Gentilhomme, Condé's page, and a poetaster to whom came one hour of afflatus, or, as he and his world believed, of direct revelation. He prophesied the unhoped-for birth of Louis XIII. Afterwards, he wrote no more, a wise abstinence that gives him a title to respect in Browning's eyes. Stanzas lix.-lxvi. recall Browning's conception in An Epistle of the after-life of the raised Lazarus. Browning's second 'poet,' for whom a yellow-green flamelet does duty, is he whose history suggested Piron's Métromanie. Desforges - Maillard, stimulated by the earlier Croisickese example, determined to achieve greatness too. He forwarded his verses to Le Mercure de France to be contemptuously refused admission into its pages. While he fumed under the editor, La Roque's, treatment, his shrewder sister hit on a plan of redress. Copying out her brother's

effusions, and forwarding them with a girlish entreaty and under a feminine pen-name, she not only subdued La Roque, and presently had him at her feet in a loveletter, but also extracted homage from Voltaire, and adulation from literary Paris. The Breton Sappho, as they called her, doubtless enjoyed the continuance of her joke, but the conceit of Desforges-Maillard could not long endure the vicarious reputation. He journeyed to Paris and stormed the editor. La Roque hid his discomfiture, and, to spite Voltaire, to whom he, being a man of letters, owed a grudge, he passed him on the hoax. A glance was sufficient to explain the situation to Voltaire, and DesforgesMaillard was speedily returned-empty-to Brittany. The following extract from Voltaire's correspondence amusingly connects the poem with literary history: "L'aventure de la Malcrais-Maillard est assez plaisante. Elle prouve au moins que nous sommes trèsgalants; car quand Maillard nous écrivait, nous ne lisions pas ses vers; quand Mdlle de la Vigne nous écrivit, nous lui fîmes des déclarations."

At the end of his story, Browning turns to his auditor and gives her a test for judging poets. That poet, he says, who leads the happiest life is the greatest, because a poet necessarily feels, i.e. suffers, more than others, and if he can but yoke his feelings to his chariot, instead of being torn to pieces by them, he proves his pre-eminence.

Dramatic Idyls, First Series, 1879, (Vol. XV.), show the poet of unexpectedness at the top of

his bent. Twists, surprises, abrupt turns which seem, though they are not actually, changes of idea, are ingredients in every poem. In Dramatic Idyls, Browning collects a number of traditions and legends of sensational action. But where others see the act, Browning sees the motive, and so, in his accustomed way, he gives the action as from within, identifying himself with the doer. Accordingly, these dramatic idyls illustrate character in action, not action by and for itself. All the poems depict crises of character, or those determining moments of life on the significance of which Browning never tires of dwelling. The circumstances of the stories are tragic, the impression left by many of them painful and sad, for whereas former moral struggles as realised by Browning have, as a rule, resulted in victory for the soul, the stories of rare, yet thinkable trials in Martin Relph, Ivan Ivanovitch, and Clive, with their dread moral abysses, solely evoke from the depths of us the trembling prayer, Lead us not into such temptation. Browning's own reconcilement with much that is repellent, fierce, and criminal in the subjects of his poems is to be found in the concluding lines of Halbert and Hob. A spiritual unknown quantity, the 'reason out of nature,' is never far from Browning's image of life, and we see how it operates in his presentment even of such characters as Halbert, Hob, and the Bratts'.

Martin Relph records an old man's self-imposed penance of annually standing just where he succumbed