pound and squeeze
And clarify,--refine to proof *2*
The liquor filtered by degrees,
While the world stands aloof.

XII.

And there's the extract, flasked and fine,
And priced and salable at last!
And Hobbs, Nobbs, Stokes, and Nokes combine
To paint the future from the past,
Put blue into their line. *3*

XIII.

Hobbs hints blue,--straight he turtle eats:
Nobbs prints blue,--claret crowns his cup:
Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats,--
Both gorge. Who finished the murex up?
What porridge had John Keats?

--
*1* named: Announced.
*2* Original reading:--
"Till art comes,--comes to pound and squeeze
And clarify,--refines to proof."
*3* "Line" is perhaps meant to be used equivocally,--
their line of business or line of their verse.
--

The spiritual ebb and flow exhibited in English poetry
(the highest tide being reached in Tennyson and Browning)
which I have endeavored cursorily to present, bear testimony
to the fact that human nature WILL assert its wholeness
in the civilized man. And there must come a time, in the progress
of civilization, when this ebb and flow will be less marked
than it has been heretofore, by reason of a better balancing,
which will be brought about, of the intellectual and the spiritual.
Each will have its due activity. The man of intellectual pursuits
will not have a starved spiritual nature; and the man of predominant
spiritual functions will not have an intellect weakened
into a submissiveness to formulated, stereotyped, and, consequently,
lifeless dogmas.

Robert Browning is in himself the completest fulfilment
of this equipoise of the intellectual and the spiritual,
possessing each in an exalted degree; and his poetry is
an emphasized expression of his own personality, and a prophecy
of the ultimate results of Christian civilization.

II. The Idea of Personality and of Art as an intermediate agency of Personality, as embodied in Browning's Poetry.

1. General Remarks.

"Subsists no law of Life outside of Life.
* * * * *
The Christ himself had been no Lawgiver,
Unless he had given the LIFE, too, with the law."

The importance of Robert Browning's poetry, as embodying
the profoundest thought, the subtlest and most complex sentiment, and,
above all, the most quickening spirituality of the age, has, a