ental exposition of
the nature of things. Or, to express the same thing in another way, it
was a deliberate hypothesis, which he sought to apply to facts and to
test by their means, almost in the same manner as that in which natural
science applies and tests its principles.

That Browning's ethical and religious ideas were for him something
different from, and perhaps more than, mere poetic sentiments, will, I
believe, be scarcely denied. That he held a deliberate theory, and held
it with greater and greater difficulty as he became older, and as his
dialectical tendencies grew and threatened to wreck his artistic
freedom, is evident to any one who regards his work as a whole. But it
will not be admitted so readily that anything other than harm can issue
from an attempt to deal with him as if he were a philosopher. Even if it
be allowed that he held and expressed a definite theory, will it retain
any value if we take it out of the region of poetry and impassioned
religious faith, into the frigid zone of philosophical inquiry? Could
any one maintain, apart from the intoxication of religious and poetic
sentiment, that the essence of existence is love? As long as we remain
within the realm of imagination, it may be argued, we may find in our
poet's great sayings both solacement and strength, both rest and an
impulse towards higher moral endeavour; but if we seek to treat them as
theories of facts, and turn upon them the light of the understanding,
will they not inevitably prove to be hallucinations? Poetry, we think,
has its own proper place and function. It is an invaluable anodyne to
the cark and care of reflective thought; an opiate which, by steeping
the critical intellect in slumber, sets the soul free to rise on the
wings of religious faith. But reason breaks the spell; and the world of
poetry, and religion--a world which to them is always beautiful and good
with God's presence--becomes a system of inexorable laws, dead,
mechanical, explicable in strict truth, as an equipoise of constantly
changing forms of energy.

There is, at the present time, a widespread belief that we had better
keep poetry and religion beyond the reach of critical investigation, if
we set any store by them. Faith and reason are thought to be finally
divorced. It is an article of the common creed that every attempt which
the world has made to bring them together has resulted in denial, or at
the best in doubt, regarding all supersensuous facts.