the prelude, to find himself set
Clear and safe in new light and new life,--a new harmony yet
To be run, and continued, and ended--who knows?--or endure!
The man taught enough by life's dream, of the rest to make sure."

Browning's message in its completeness was invariably that which is
imaged, too, in these lines from Mrs. Browning's "Aurora Leigh":

"And take for a worthier stage the soul itself,
Its shifting fancies and celestial lights."

For it is only in this drama of the infinite life that the spiritual man
can be tested. It was from the standpoint of an actor on this celestial
stage that Browning considered Shelley. In the entire range of Browning's
art the spiritual man is imaged as a complex and individualized spark of
the divine force. He is seen for a flitting moment on his way toward a
divine destiny.

Professor Hall Griffin states as his belief that Browning's paper was to
some degree inspired by that of Joseph Milsand on himself, which appeared
in August, 1851, in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ in which Milsand commended
Browning's work "as pervaded by an intense belief in the importance of the
individual soul."

To Browning this winter was enchanted by the initiation of his friendship
with Milsand, the distinguished French scholar and critic, who had already
made a name as a philosophic thinker and had published a book on Ruskin
(_L'Esthetique Anglaise_), and who was a discerner of spirits in poetic
art as well. About the time that "Paracelsus" appeared, Milsand had seen
an extract from the poem that captivated him, and he at once sent for the
volume. He had also read, with the deepest interest, Browning's "Christmas
Eve and Easter Day." He was contributing to the _Revue des Deux Mondes_
two papers on _La Poesie Anglaise depuis Byron_, the first of which, on
Tennyson, had appeared the previous August. Milsand was about completing
the second paper of this series (on Browning), and it happened just at
this time that Miss Mitford's "Recollections of a Literary Life" was
published, in which, writing of the Brownings, she had told the story of
that tragic death of Mrs. Browning's brother Edward, who had been drowned
at Torquay. In these days, when, as Emerson rhymes the fact,

"Every thought is public,
Every nook is wide,
The gossips spread each whisper
And the gods from side to side,"

it is a little difficult to quite comprehend, even in comprehending Mrs.
Browning's intens