us, its machinery the
rickety heirlooms of old humbugs of Greece and Alexandria. No thrill, no
terror, no true awe, nothing but "goose-flesh" and disgust, creep from
the medium's presence. Pegasus need not be saddled; summon, rather, the
police.

Yet this composition, which Mr. Browning must have undertaken in a
moment of high indignation, with the motive of self-relief, is full of
common sense. Mr. Sludge's vindication of his career turns upon the
point that people like on the whole to be deceived, especially in
matters relating to the invisible world. Sludge must be right in this;
otherwise the theologians would not have had such a successful run. The
facile and eager "circle" betrays the imaginative medium into reporting
what it appears most to desire. The superstition of the people excites
and feeds his own. He is only one against a crowd which deluges him with
its expectation, and resents a scarcity of the supernatural. Mr. Sludge
is not so much to blame: the people at length push the thing so far that
he is obliged to cheat in self-defence. And when a man tasks his wits
successfully, if it be only to mislead the witless, he has a sense of
satisfaction in the effort akin to that of the rhetorician and the
quack.

But shrewdness and good sense cannot make a poem by assuming the measure
of blank verse. And a few Yankee phrases are pasted into Mr. Sludge's
talk, such as "stiffish cock-tail," "V-notes," "sniggering," allusions
to "Greeley's newspaper," Beacon Street, etc.: there is no character in
them at all. Mr. Sludge is a bad Yankee, as well as impudent pleader.
The lines never sparkle, even with the poet's indignation, but they seem
to be all the time blown into a forced vivacity and heat. Nemesis
attends the poet who plunges his arm for a subject into this burrow of
Spiritualism.

Let us pass from this to note the noble lesson that the last poem,
entitled "Epilogue," conveys. Three speakers tell in turn their feeling
of the Divine Presence. The first intones the old Hebrew notion, loved
by the childhood of all races and countries, that the Lord's Face fills
His earthly temple at stated periods, culminating with the human glory
of psalms and hallelujahs, to absorb and shine in the rejoicing of the
worshippers, to sink back again into the invisible upon the dying
strain. The second speaker describes the reaction, when the enthusiastic
belief of early times is replaced by a dull sense that no Face shines,
by a d