y long and slow battle. But
there are those, of whom I was one"--and here Browning draws the man of
genius--"who are born at the very point to which these others, the men
of talent, have painfully attained. By intuition genius knows, and I
knew at once, what God is, what we are, what life is. Alas! I could not
use the knowledge aright. There is an answer to the passionate longings
of the heart for fulness, and I knew it. And the answer is this: Live in
all things outside of yourself by love and you will have joy. That is
the life of God; it ought to be our life. In him it is accomplished and
perfect; but in all created things it is a lesson learned slowly
against difficulty.

"Thus I knew the truth, but I was led away from it. I broke down from
thinking of myself, my fame, and of this world. I had not love enough,
and I lost the truth for a time. But whatever my failures were, I never
lost sight of it altogether. I never was content with myself or with the
earth. Out of my misery I cried for the joy God has in living outside of
himself in love of all things."

Then, thrilled with this thought, he breaks forth into a most noble
description--new in English poetry, new in feeling and in thought,
enough of itself to lift Browning on to his lofty peak--first of the joy
of God in the Universe he makes incessantly by pouring out of himself
his life, and, secondly, of the joy of all things in God. "Where dwells
enjoyment there is He." But every realised enjoyment looks forward, even
in God, to a new and higher sphere of distant glory, and when that is
reached, to another sphere beyond--

thus climbs
Pleasure its heights for ever and for ever.

Creation is God's joyous self-giving. The building of the frame of earth
was God's first joy in Earth. That made him conceive a greater joy--the
joy of clothing the earth, of making life therein--of the love which in
animals, and last in man, multiplies life for ever.

So there is progress of all things to man, and all created things before
his coming have--in beauty, in power, in knowledge, in dim shapes of
love and trust in the animals--had prophecies of him which man has
realised, hints and previsions, dimly picturing the higher race, till
man appeared at last, and one stage of being was complete. But the law
of progress does not cease now man has come. None of his faculties are
perfect. They also by their imperfection suggest a further life, in
which as all t