It rose distinctly at the base,

With its seven proper colours chorded,
Which still in the rising were compressed,
Until at last they coalesced,

And supreme the spectral creature lorded
In a triumph of whitest white-
Above which intervened the night.
But above night too like only the next,
The second of a wondrous sequence,
Reaching in rare and rarer frequence
Till the heaven of heavens was circumflext,
Another rainbow rose, a mightier,
Fainter, flushier, and flightier-

Rapture dying along its verge!

Oh, whose foot shall I see emerge,
WHOSE, from the straining topmost dark
On to the keystone of that arc?"

Then follows the vision of the Christ, at once more supernatural and more unquestionably real, as it would seem, because of the sublimity of the scene, springing out of the grotesquerie-" He, Himself with His human air," who had been in the chapel too, and had left it apparently with the poet. The disciple tries to justify himself in some sort for despising Christ's friends.

In the cleansing sun, his wool

Steeps in the flood of noontide whiteness
Some defiled, discoloured web-

So lay I saturate with brightness."

And the Master accepts the love, mistaken and imperfect though it is. He gathers the suppliant, as it were, in the folds of His long sweeping garment, carries him across the world, and in vision "whether in the body or out of the body he cannot tell," shows him other sights of other worshippers-at the high Festival on Christmas Eve in S. Peter's at Rome, in the Lecture Room of the sceptical Professor at Göttingen-sheep of the good Shepherd who are not of this fold-and teaches him all the lesson of His Love, until at last the disciple, at the bidding of Love-

"From the gift looking to the Giver,
And from the cistern to the River,

And from the finite to infinity,

And from man's dust to God's divinity,"

learns that although there needs must be one best way of worship, if indeed it is God's design to bring all wanderers to the true fold at last, yet for each disciple the best way of worship is that which is required by his own highest thought, his own purest passion, because Love, and no other word, is written on the forehead of all true worshippers of the Incarnate Christ in whose eyes love with defective knowledge is of infinitely more spiritual worth than knowledge with defective love

"For the loving worm within its clod
Were diviner than a loveless God
Amid his worlds, I will dare to say."

In the companion poem of "Easter Day" it is still this thought of the supremacy of Love which is at the heart of the poem. The poet pictures himself once again by night on the desolate common, musing upon the secret of life and wondering how it would be with him if he were to die and find himself in a moment in the presence of his Divine Judge. Suddenly the doom is upon him. A fierce and vindictive scribble of red quick flame runs across the blackness of night: and a Voice beside him proclaims that

"Life is done,

Time ends, eternity's begun."

And in the probation of life he knows that his choice has been not for heaven, but for earth, for the world of sense, with all its joy, its beauty, its art, its success, its knowledge. And again the Voice proclaims, "Eternity is here and thou art judged; thou hast chosen, the joys of earth be thine." But again all looks as it did before. He could not make it out. The world gone, yet here. Judgment past and eternity begun, and yet all things as in other days. It must be a horrid dream. He tries to shake it off. But in vain. Gradually, to his despair, he finds that what he had chosen brings him no happiness, no content. The plenitude of beauty, the glory of art, the joy of knowledge, all these fail him. Earth is no longer earth to the doomed man. In the horror of its blank and passionless uniformity, he cowers at the Judge's feet, and knows at last that Love is the essence and the worth of all things, and he cries for that, for Love only

"Is this thy final choice?

Love is the best? 'Tis somewhat late!
And all thou dost enumerate

Of power and beauty in the world,

The righteousness of love was curled
Inextricably round about.

Love lay within it and without,

To clasp thee-but in vain! Thy soul

Still shrunk from Him who made thee whole,

Still set deliberate aside

His love!-Now take love! Well betide

Thy tardy conscience! "

So at last to the heart of the poet, driven to his last fortress, contrite, broken, Christ the Doomsman becomes in a moment Christ the Saviour :

"Then did the Form expand, expand-
I knew Him through the dread disguise
As the whole God within His eyes
Embraced me.

... But Easter-Day breaks!
Christ rises! Mercy every way
Is infinite, and who can say?"

But

And "who can say?" So he ends on the same note with which he began. "How very hard it is to be a Christian!" Was this indeed his last word? or would perhaps Browning have said in similar words to those of his great compeer, Tennyson, "How very hard it is to be a Christian, but how very much harder not to be"? I cannot say. But this surely I may say of him and of many another in these days, who owe to Christianity their whole philosophy, their whole view of life, their supreme ideal for the conduct of life, who look to Christianity also for the only answer they can find to

those eternal problems which face and perplex us all, who still like the captive exiles of old worship "towards the Temple," though for the present they may be outside its visible walls; "they cannot, indeed, be excluded from membership at least in the mystical body of Christ, which is the blessed company of all faithful people,' for by the only test which Christ Himself suggested for membership, they do belong to His Church, to the soul of His Church, for they bring forth the fruits of the Spirit,' they are not yet deserters to the world, they are not fleshly, or cruel, or malicious, but loving and joyful, and kind and gentle and good." Whether Browning was a good churchman or not I cannot say. But I will But I will say that he was a good Christian, he belonged to the "soul of the Church"; he was one of those men who ever serve to remind the Church of that which she is always in danger of forgetting, that no dogma and no fact of history has any true religious life at all, if it is divorced from its spiritual or moral significance. For though the soul- the soul of the Church-may live without the body, the body cannot live without the soul.

I have no time to say more. One final word only of Browning himself. The lessons which he taught us in "Christmas Eve" and "Easter Day" he repeated in other poems over and over again. It is always the same lesson-the moral significance of the Christian ideas always the lesson which shines out from that Life, which though it was the typical tragedy of mankind, yet was the life of One, of whose sublime optimism, of whose radiant view of human nature, and

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