furry garments in Italy, in preparation for a residence in Russia." Man loses the joy that belongs to the physical when he attempts to discount the delights of the spiritual.

Our poet enjoins to be satisfied with earth's knowledge, experience, and insights, leaving for the next life the lessons that can be learned there only. "It is not for man to snatch fire from heaven. Earthly lamps, and so much fire as sun vouchsafes, he may have to walk by."

The Grammarian postponed his earthly happiness waiting for full knowledge; and they buried him, earth's joys untasted. Cleon drained this life's full cup; and they buried him, the wine of the spirit untasted. Lazarus, dazed by premature sight of heavenly glories, walked earth as in a dream, “eternity's concern thrust into time,' "the faultier, that he knew God's secret while he held the thread of life." Amphibian unites both lives within himself, the physical and the spiritual, in complete concord and mutual subservience. "He lives and likes life's way," and can also "leave the land and swim in the sphere which overbrims,"" where, just unable to fly, one swims, gives flesh such noon-disport, as a finer element affords the spirit sort."

And what is this life's purpose?

"To learn earth first, discover Will, Power, and Love below, then seek law's confirmation above.” On earth begins man's spiritual evolution. This is not a world of finalities. The perfect life of the spirit is not attainable here, and the absolute religious truth is not attainable here. Man's approximations to absolute truth, his creeds and formulations are as tabernacles-never homes. Every living soul outgrows the spiritual house it has builded,—its successive shelters being but for a nights tarry on the journey of many stops and many starts, and no arrival.

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And "what, if life, be just our one chance o' the prize of learning love, how love might be, hath been indeed, and is ";—" how love is the only good in the world; and learning to love through human fellowship" man's greatest joy; and loving service for his brother, man's highest privilege. "With Browning it is ever, love first, all things for love.” Emerson said, "It is the wail of the nineteenth century, missing the end of life which is love." "Without love, this beamy world were a blank,—a frame-work lacking a picture,—a bower of roses with naught to embower ;-breathe but one breath of love, all is rose beauty above, and all that was death grows life, grows love,

greatens and glorifies, till God's aglow, to the loving eyes, in what was mere earth before."

Though love be the highest aim of life, Browning teaches that it is not the only aim. Aprile's life was all for love. He had the reward of more love, and of being loved. But life's summing up was barren, incomplete, a failure, for, while love abounded, knowledge was lacking. Paracelsus's aim was to know. "For this he broke with law, e'en with the law of love." He had the reward of much knowledge, the praise and wonder of men; but life's summing up was incomplete, barren, a failure, for, while knowledge abounded love was lacking. Sordello loved men only less than self, he would rule them, partly for their good, partly for his own glory. He had the reward of mixed aims; striving to grasp too much, he lost all. Success eluded, for his eye was not single.

Hear the sentence passed upon one whose aims centered in sense, earth and time. "Thou art shut out of the heaven of spirit, glut thy sense upon the world; 'tis thine forever,-take it." And the selfabsorded life, is pictured as "one vast, red, drear, burnt-up plain," frightful in its loneliness, empty even of shadows and echoing silences. The tragedy of mistaken aims, is musically told in the poem, "Over the sea our galleys went"; "The sad rhyme of the men who proudly clung to their first fault," and in their wilfulness bestowed their precious freight, the sculpture of their lives, on barren isle. And not less tragic, the presumptuous aim. Paracelsus believed himself peculiarly God favored, set apart for the discovery of the hidden. He sets forth on his mission, to "gather the sacred knowledge here and there dispersed about the world, to discover the true laws by which flesh bars in the spirit," full of magnificient confidence, he goes to prove his soul. "I shall arrive! In His good time! He guides me and the bird!" but "all gorgeous dreams were born to vanish. "Thus was life scorned," by one who "abode not within his warrant, but presumptuous boasted God's labor laid on him." Ascend the tower reared by Protus to self-culture, self-enjoyment, self-aggrandizement ; "builded in hope of some eventual rest atop, a calm within the finite.” "The tumult of the building hushed, the first of men looks toward the east. He sees the wider but to sigh the more. The soul craves all, and still the flesh replies, 'take no jot more than ere you climbed the tower to look abroad.' Alas! most progress is most failure."

And shall action wait until the perfect aim present itself? "To live and learn, not first learn and then live, is our concern; to act

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to-day, learning thereby to act to-morrow.' To tarry for fullness of love, or completeness of knowledge, or perfection in aim, is to see never the time and the place." This is life's business; with to-day's rude tool, and to-day's awkward hand, to do to-day's common task. To-morrow brings the sharper tool, the nimbler hand, and the grander work.

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Browning has little patience with the inert, the supine, the procrastinating. He has all patience with crudity in the statue, coarseness in the picture, unripeness in the thought, clumsiness in the deed, so these be the expression of the artificer's highest ideal. Trusting his feeble, fullest sense," he would have man contend to the uttermost for his life's set prize, be it what it will; for the sin of each frustrate ghost is the unlit lamp and the ungirt lion." "So shall the soul declare itself by its fruit, by the thing it does;-be hate that fruit, or love that fruit, it forwards the general deed of man ; and each of the many helps to recruit the life of the race by a general plan; each living his own to boot." "Thus man works his proper nature out and ascertains his rank and final place.,"

"So, all men strive and who succeeds?

Look at the end of work, contrast

The petty Done, the Undone vast,

This Present with the Hopeful Past.

What hand and brain went ever paired ?
What heart, alike conceived and dared?
What act proved all its thought had been?
What will but felt the fleshly screen?"

"Yet, the will's somewhat!"

to? this "

"A mans reach should be beyond his grasp "; and, "if this life gave all, what were there to look forward Earth is the place for attempt-" anon performance." And stops my despair. 'Tis not what man does that exalts him, but what man would do." "What I aspire to be, and was not, comforts me; a brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale." "And so, "I live, go through the world, try, prove, reject, prefer, still struggling to effect my warfare? happy that I can be crossed and thwarted as a man; not left in God's contempt apart, with ghastly smooth life, dead at heart.”

Who shall say of his fellow, "he has failed?

"That low man seeks a little thing to do,

Sees it and does it;

That high man with a great thing to pursue,

this d

His

poet

for

wh

lo

Dies ere he knows it,

That, has the world here,

This, throws himself on God, and unperplexed,
Seeking shall find Him;

God's task, to make the heavenly period
Perfect the earthen."

And of poets, "silent because none listens, whose lips are locked in this dark world,—perhaps God needs you, just saves your light to spend ; His clenched hand shall unclose at last and let out all the beauty; the poet holds the future fast, accepts the coming ages duty, their Present for this Past."

And of the common-place life known to the streets of Vallodolid; -wait, and count the "angels ministrant about the low truckle-bed, where the Kings friend, who has done the Kings work the whole day long," tarries for his summons to the palace.

And of lives builded into, merged in other lives, like rivers sunk in sands. Men say of such "They're lost; " but waving rice and lordly palm, (the people's bread and wine), betray their hidden course while papyrus and reed conspire together to record the secret beneficence.

What is success, and what failure?

"Now who shall arbitrate ?

Ten men love what I hate,

Shun what I follow, slight what I receive;

Ten who in eyes and ears

Match me; we all surmise,

They, this thing, and I that, whom shall my soul believe ?"

For, "our human speech is naught, our testimony false,

Our fame and human estimation, words and wind."

Man's standards differ each from each, and all differ from the absolute and unknown standard by which lives may be rightly judged. Then too, men never gather all the facts. It has been said, that "this life being but a small part of life, men should know of the rest before they can say of this portion, that it is failure or success." The perfect judgment waits God's time, who knows all from the beginning. Man, who “sees light, half shine, half shade,” “looks to the size of things in this world,"_"the things done that have their price here"; "the vulgar mass called 'work,' the low world can value in a trice, plumb with its course thumb; God holds appraising in his hollow

palm, the seed of act, thought hardly to be packed into a narrow act; fancies that broke through language and escaped; all instincts immature, all purposes unsure, that weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's account. All he could never be, all men ignored, this, was he worth to God whose wheel the pitcher shaped."

Browning holds that evil and its kindred brood, darkness, cold, silence, weakness, falsehood, death, are not realities, but nonentities implying and defining their opposites. Evil is transitory, implying or intimating the enduring.

Good and evil, truth and falsehood, are relative terms. What yesterday seemed good, is for to-day a lesser good, or what men call evil; and what yesterday seemed truth, is for to-day a half-truth, or what men call falsehood. The toy, is to-day the child's tool with which he works; the same toy is to-morrow, the man's plaything with which he idles. The gray contrasted with black is white; contrasted Iwith white it is black. "To eyes purged to receive truth's beam, how then seem the intricacies of right and wrong we deem irreconcilable?"

Evil is as friction, helping while opposing. It exists that man may transform it to a good, and grow strong in his wrestle with it. 'Upon men's own account must evil stay."

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And of temptation; "It is for man to meet and master, and make crouch beneath his foot, and so he pedestalled in triumph.'

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And of doubt; it is the forerunner of belief, itself transitory. You must mix some uncertainty with faith, if you would have faith be, just so much of doubt as bids man plant a surer foot upon the sun-road"; then, "prize the doubt, low kinds exist without, finished and finite clods untroubled by a spark."

"Thus is evil beautified in every shape." "Truth inside; and outside truth also; and between each, falsehood that is change, as truth is permanence." Thus, "working through the shows of sense (which ever proving false, still promise to be true,) the individual soul works upward, to an outer soul as individual too; and through the fleeting, lives to die into the fixed; and reach at length, God, man, or both together mixed."

Shall evil and imperfection escape their consequences, oftener called their retributions? Browning's characters reap what they sow, just as people in life do. Mistakes of ignorance, wilfulness, or helplessness are followed by their "logical and mathematical results." With Lucretius, our poet sings "the reign of law in the universe;