star, above--
Which tasks strength, wisdom, stateliness, to lift
His manhood to the height that takes the prize."

Browning conceived and presented the organic idea and ideal of life, in
its fullness, its intensity, as perhaps few poets have ever done. He would
almost place a positive sin above a negative virtue. To live intensely,
even if it be sinfully, was to Browning's vision to be on the upward way,
rather than to be in a state of negative good. The spirit of man is its
own witness of the presence of God. Life cannot be truly lived in any
fantastic isolation.

"Just when we're safest, there's a sunset touch,
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death,
A chorus ending from Euripides."

With Browning, as with Spinoza, there is an impatience, too, with the
perpetual references to death, and they both constantly turn to the
everlasting truth of life. "It is this harping on death that I despise so
much," exclaimed Browning, in the later years of his life, in a
conversation with a friend. "In fiction, in poetry, in art, in literature
this shadow of death, call it what you will,--despair, negation,
indifference,--is upon us. But what fools who talk thus!... Why, death is
life, just as our daily momentarily dying body is none the less alive, and
ever recruiting new forces of existence. Without death, which is our word
for change, for growth, there could be no prolongation of that which we
call life."

After the completion of "Christmas Eve and Easter Day," Mrs. Browning
questioned her husband about the apparent asceticism of the second part of
the poem, and he replied that he meant it to show only one side of the
matter. "Don't think," she wrote to a friend, "that Robert has taken to
the cilix,--indeed he has not, but it is his way to see things as
passionately as other people feel them."

Browning teaches in this poem that faith is an adventure of the spirit,
the aspiration felt, even if unnamed. But as to renunciation,--

"'Renounce the world!'--Ah, were it done
By merely cutting one by one
Your limbs off, with your wise head last,
How easy were it!"

The renunciation that the poet sees is not so simple. It is not to put
aside all the allurements of life, but to use them nobly; to persist in
the life of the spirit, to offer love for hatred, truth for falsehood,
generous self-sacrifice rather than to grasp advantages,--to live, not to
forsake the common daily lot. It is, indeed, the phil