nd convention. The
souls of men appear as the victors over all material and immaterial
obstacles. Human affection transforms the bare room to a bower of
fruits and flowers; human courage and resolution carry Childe Roland
victoriously past the threats and terrors of malignant nature, and
the despair from accumulated memories of failure; death itself is
described in _Evelyn Hope_, in _Prospice_, in _Rabbi Ben
Ezra_, as a phase, a transit of the soul, wherein the material
aspects and the physical terrors disappear. In Browning's poetry, the
one real and permanent thing is the world of ideas, the world of the
spirit. He is in this one of the truest Platonists of modern times.

To many young readers this method in art comes like a revelation.
Other poets also portray the souls of men; but Browning does it
more obviously, more intentionally, more insistently. It is well,
therefore, to have read Browning. To learn to read him aright is to
enter the gateway to other good and great poetry.

Out of this predominating interest in the souls of men, and out of his
intense intellectual activity and scientific curiosity, grows one of
Browning's greatest defects. He is often led too far afield, into
intricacies and anomalies of character beyond the range of common
experience and sympathy. The criminal, the "moral idiot," belong to
the alienist rather than to the poet. The abnormalities of nature
have no place in the world of great art; they do not echo the common
experience of mankind. Already the interest is decreasing in that part
of his poetry which deals with such themes. Bishop Blougram and Mr.
Sludge will not take place in the ranks of artistic creations. Nor can
the poet's "special pleading" for such types, however ingenious it
may be, whatever philanthropy of soul it may imply, be regarded as
justification. Sometimes, indeed, the poet is led by his sympathy and
his intellectual ingenuity into defences that are inconsistent with
his own standards of the true and the beautiful.

The trait in Browning which appeals to the largest number of readers
is his strenuous optimism. He will admit no evil or sorrow too
great to be borne, too irrational to have some ultimate purpose of
beneficence. "There shall never be one lost good," says Abt Vogler.
The suicides in the morgue only serve to call forth his declaration:--

"My own hope is, a sun will pierce
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched;

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