lla among the
mountains near Geneva, where Mr. Browning, with his sister and a friend
of many years standing, spent part of the summer of 1877. The poem so
christened is addressed to this friend, and was inspired by her death:
which took place with appalling suddenness while they were there
together. The shock of the event re-opened the great questions which had
long before been solved by Mr. Browning's mind: and within sight of the
new-made grave, he re-laid the foundations of his faith, that there is
another life for the soul.

The argument is marked by a strong sense of the personal and therefore
relative character of human experience and knowledge. It accepts the
"subjective synthesis" of some non-theistic thinkers, though excluding,
of course, the negations on which this rests; and its greater maturity
is shown by the philosophic form in which the author's old religious
doctrine of personal (or subjective) truth has been re-cast. He assumes
here, it is true, that God and the soul exist. He considers their
existence as given, in the double fact that there is something in us
which thinks or perceives,[61] and something outside and beyond us,
which is perceived by it; and this subject and object, which he names
the Soul and God, are to him beyond the necessity of farther proof,
because beyond the reach of it. He might therefore challenge for his
conclusions something more than an optional belief. He guards himself,
nevertheless, against imposing the verdict of his own experience on any
other man: and both the question and the answer into which the poem
resolves itself begin for his own spirit and end so.

Mr. Browning knows himself a single point in the creative series of
effect and cause: at the same moment one and the other: all behind and
before him a blank. Or, more helpless still, he is the rush, floated by
a current, of which the whence and whither are independent of it, and
which may land it to strike root again, or cast it ashore a wreck. He
asks himself, as he is whirled on his "brief, blind voyage" down the
stream of life, which of these fates it has in store for him. Knowing
this, that God and the soul exist--no less than this, and no more--he
asks himself whether he is justified in believing that, because his
present existence is beyond a doubt, its renewal is beyond doubt also:
that the current, which has brought him thus far, will land him, not in
destruction, but in another life.

"Everything," he de