A warmth within the heart would melt The freezing reason's colder part, And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answered, 'I have felt.'

No, like a child in doubt and fear;
But that blind clamour made me wise;
Then was I as a child that cries,
But crying, knows his father near;

And what I am beheld again

What is, and no man understands; And out of darkness came the hands That reach through nature, moulding men.

CHAPTER VI

Browning's Interpretation of Love

CHAPTER VI

BROWNING'S INTERPRETATION OF LOVE

Cannon Farrar in a lecture in this country said that the study of Robert Browning was equivalent to a liberal education. And it is not hard to see why this may be true.

Browning was an omnivorous student, of all the great concerns of human interest, of the various fields of human thought, even more than Tennyson a profound student of man. For while there is always something insular and English about Tennyson, Mr. Browning is a man of the world, and is the first great exponent in English literature of the world-consciousness. So in studying Browning, one is brought into contact with many lands and times and persons. Such intercourse tends to a liberal culture.

Mr. Browning is essentially a thinker; he is an interpreter of life, a philosopher before he is a poet; using his poetic genius, his power of penetrative insight, to see into the life of things, to pluck out the heart of the mystery; and he does this with such fertility, and originality, and often difficulty of thought and expression as to quicken and develop any mind that will make his poetry a serious study. As Mr. Stedman says of "The Ring and the Book": "The thought, the vocabulary, the imagery, the wisdom, lavished upon this story, would equip a score of ordinary writers, and place them beyond danger of neglect."

And then Mr. Browning is essentially a religious philosopher, an ethical teacher more than a metaphysician. He is the poet of the soul. He traces the inner processes of a life, hunting motives to the darkest hiding-places, laying open the motions of the heart, revealing a man to himself, showing that "life's business is just the terrible choice," showing morality necessarily ever under the guise of warfare, God's training of a soul.

So the study of Browning means a truer knowledge of the soul, and a grasp after the relation of man to the world and to God, beside the training of a wide culture. In his journey to Australia, Henry Drummond took a complete set of Browning, and recorded in his journal, "None can approach Browning in insight into life, or even into Christianity."

No man has come so slowly to his kingdom as Browning. Like Tennyson his father was a poet, though of little achievement, and the boy was trained to be a poet from childhood. As a little boy of eight he walked around the dining-room table, spanning out the scansion of his verses with his hand on the smooth mahogany. As early as this he debated between poetry and painting as a life work, but he didn't debate long, for it was only a moment's wavering of the purpose that controlled his conscious life, as he himself puts it thirty-five years after:

I shall never in the years remaining,

Paint you pictures, no, nor carve you statues,
Make you music that should all-express me:
Verse alone, one life allows me.

At twelve, he had poems enough for a volume, but tried in vain to get a publisher. Thus far he had been under