tic power and a
grim humour suited to the theme, the "transmutation" of Ned Bratts.
Karshish has his sudden revealing flash as he ponders the letter of
Abib:--

"The very God! Think, Abib, dost thou think,--
So the All-great were the All-loving too"--

and the boy David his prophetic vision. A yet more splendid vision
breaks from the seemingly ruined brain of the dying Paracelsus, and he
has a gentler comrade in the dying courtier, who starts up from his
darkened chamber crying that--

"Spite of thick air and closed doors
God told him it was June,--when harebells grow,
And all that kings could ever give or take
Would not be precious as those blooms to me."

But it is not only in these magical transitions and transformations that
Browning's joy in soul was decisively coloured by his joy in power. A
whole class of his characters--the most familiarly "Browningesque"
division of them all--was shaped under the sway of this master-passion;
the noble army of "strivers" who succeed and of "strivers" who fail,
baffled artists and rejected lovers who mount to higher things on
stepping-stones of their frustrated selves, like the heroes of _Old
Painters in Florence_, and _The Last Ride Together_, and _The Lost
Mistress_; and on the other hand, the artists and lovers who fail for
want of this saving energy, like the Duke and Lady of the _Statue and
the Bust_, like Andrea del Sarto and the Unknown Painter. But his very
preoccupation with Art and with Love itself sprang mainly from his
peculiar joy in the ardent putting-forth of soul. No kind of vivid
consciousness was indifferent to him, but the luxurious receptivity of
the spectator or of a passively beloved mistress touched him little,
compared with the faintest pulsation of the artist's "love of loving,
rage of knowing, feeling, seeing the absolute truth of things," of the
lover's passion for union with another soul. When he describes effects
of music or painting, he passes instinctively over to the standpoint of
the composer or the performer; shows us Hugues and Andrea themselves at
the organ, or the easel; and instead of feeling the world turned into
"an unsubstantial faery place" by the magic of the cuckoo or the thrush,
strikes out playful theories of the professional methods of these
songsters,--the cuckoo's monopoly of the "minor third," the thrush's
wise way of repeating himself "lest you should think he never could
recaptu