it shall be filled and satisfied-because the order of life is finally in its favour?

The force of the special "argument" of Ben Ezra will, of course, depend on the strenuousness and vigour of the moral nature—on the freshness and zeal of the soul, so to speak; but if the order of things be moral, the argument is good.

In the next poem I take the matter is approached from quite another point of view. In "Cleon" we see the futility of longing based on the lower view of life. Cleon did not dare to hope. And yet at that very time there were hearts quick and large with this very hope. It is matter of history that Christianity gave an immense impulse to the idea and faith of a life beyond life and after death. This new and vivid faith is illustrated in certain Gospel stories-stories of men raised from the dead. The story of Lazarus as given in the Gospel of St. John is the most detailed and striking of these. Browning had read and dwelt on that story, was fascinated and interested, as thinker and poet, in certain aspects of it, and his impressions are recorded in the "Epistle of Karshish." "Cleon," it is a dramatic study, as well as a study of our present theme; I take it only in the latter sense. Karshish is an Arab physician, who has come into Palestine to gather facts bearing on his researches and pursuits. He writes an account of what he gathers to Abib, his master in the medical art. He has in his wanderings come to Bethany and found Lazarus, and he gives an account of this strange case.

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This man says he was dead-dead four days; was brought back to life by a certain Nazarene, a physician, of course, and he has since lived for many years in the most perfect health. Dead he could not have been, of course. It was a long trance-a case of epilepsy-so complete that it has led to a "mania." Still, that physician must have had strange powers to heal so completely. And the man really looks and lives as if he had been dead-had seen some great life beyond the bourne of death, and had come back with its ineffaceable impression upon him. He is dreamy, withdrawn, fantastical, with hidden fountains of light and passion within, and strangest ways of taking common things. Of course the whole case is only a curious case of madness, and Karshish apologizes for making so much of it, and turns from it to certain trivial discoveries of a professional sort, as much more important for his master. Still he is fascinated-is uncertain as to the adequacy of his explanation; and that Nazarene who wrought the cure must have been himself an uncommon man and a great physician, not only working cures like this, but speaking strange things—strange new things about God and the divine love.

And we must admit that the case would have been strangely interesting, if Lazarus could have been met nearly forty years after the event recorded by St. John. But it is not the historical case the poet is set upon; that merely puts his mind in motion on his problem, and gives him a setting for it.

And the problem is this. If a man should die, and rise again and return to the uses and limits of earth for years, what would be the effect of it on the man and on his life? It would destroy his moral balance and his interest in life; it would incapacitate him for action, for judgments really fit and practical. Most events and things would seem so little, and he would so far have lost that sense of proportion among things, that wise action would be impossible. The things of the soul itself would alone seem important. Tell a man, who had gone through such an experience and reached the conviction it would give him, that his child was dying, and your words would not move him; but let him see the least signs of evil in the child, and he would be strangely moved. He must, in fact, live with so strong and vivid a sense of the unseen universe and the final relation of things to that, that he would judge and act, not with reference to the sphere he was living in, but with reference to the invisible-a mode of action that could only perplex his conduct with reference to earthly duty. impulses and principles belong to the unseen, his tasks and actions to the seen. And his submission to the Divine Will has a quality of awe and prostration. He does not even care to proclaim his faith learned from the Nazarene, in spite of the strange importance it has for him, for he has seen how truth must prevail. And yet he is not cold or apathetic; on the contrary, he is kind and loving-cares very gently even for the birds and the flowers. And he is indignant at the

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folly and sin of men, as if he saw its madness from some height far above our common life.

The leading idea here is an idea most characteristic of Browning, and to which he recurs, perhaps, more frequently than any other; and the aspect of it that is found in this poem is nowhere put so clearly. A man who had come back from the dead would be out of place in life. The mistake of Sordello would be a necessity for one in the position of Lazarus. For a wise and proportioned conduct of this life, we must not be too conscious of the spirit and its ideals. Certainty about a life to come, and "sight" of that life, would put most things in this life out of place, and render duty impossible. The position in which we actually find ourselves is as necessary to the uses of life, as it is to the moral value of faith. There is here a truth many of us cover over by a host of unreal words affecting a certainty about that "unseen world" such as we cannot honestly have, such as would not be good for us if we were in earnest about things. Let us understand the conditions and limits of life; let us be sincere and wise; let us live and judge by the best standard of earthly duty, and not affect impossible elevations. But this, you may think, is the principle of Blougram, and agrees with his worldly realism. It is to avoid the mistake of Sordello, and the Grammarian, and Lazarus, but only by keeping hold of this life firmly, and letting the next take thought for the things of itself. But that is to make the positions alternative and choose the lower. And

that is not Browning's suggestion, nor is it the temper and bearing of his thought. We must live with a due regard for both sides of life-for the ideal and universal as for the real and temporal, for the seen as for the unseen; only understanding that the real is the actual and our sphere of duty, and that, though the true unseen is the eternal, we can but dimly apprehend and partially use such truths.

We now come to the first of the poems in which our present theme is the one theme, "Easter Day." As its title implies, it is a study of that Christian idea and hope of which Easter is the symbol and the festival-a study of that idea and hope in its relation to life and the soul. That conception of life which makes the faith of man's immortality credible, and the after-life natural, is tested within the soul itself, upon its principles and passions. The soul is set in. action, and it is dramatically shown how the spirituality and greatness of the mind and heart affirm and require the scope of such a faith; or, if the dramatic point of view be more rigidly regarded, the vital process of the Christian ideal is presented within this particular soul. The difficulty and greatness of the ideal are most forcibly shown, and the fact that, however difficult of application in life, it is the only ideal that satisfies certain souls, and is involved in all their desires and thoughts.

In harmony with this, the poem opens with the moral question, the depth of which it is to show, "How hard it is to be a Christian." And from that point a