ally, in the choice between
what is higher and less high, lies the probation of a soul, and also its
means of growth. And what is the meaning of this mortal life--this
strange phenomenon otherwise so unintelligible--if it be not the moment
in which a soul is proved, the period in which a soul is shaped and
developed for other lives to come?

To forget that Browning is a preacher may suit a dainty kind of
criticism which detaches the idea of beauty from the total of our
humanity addressed by the greater artists. But the solemn thoughts that
are taken up by beauty in such work, for example, as that of Michael
Angelo, are an essential element or an essential condition of its
peculiar character as a thing of beauty. And armour, we know, may be as
lovely to the mere senses as a flower. Browning's doctrine may sometimes
protrude gauntly through his poetry; but at his best--as in _Rabbi ben
Ezra_ or _Abt Vogler_--the thought of the poem is needful in the dance
of lyrical enthusiasm, as the male partner who takes hands with beauty,
and to separate them would bring the dance to a sudden close. Both are
present in _Easter Day_, and we must watch the movement of the two. In a
passage already quoted from _Christmas Eve_ the face of Christ is nobly
imagined as the sun which bleaches a discoloured web. Here the poet's
imagination is as intense in its presentation of Christ the doomsman:

He stood there. Like the smoke
Pillared o'er Sodom, when day broke--
I saw Him. One magnific pall
Mantled in massive fold and fall
His head, and coiled in snaky swathes
About His feet; night's black, that bathes
All else, broke, grizzled with despair,
Against the soul of blackness there.
A gesture told the mood within--
That wrapped right hand which based the chin,--
That intense meditation fixed
On His procedure,--pity mixed
With the fulfilment of decree.
Motionless thus, He spoke to me,
Who fell before His feet, a mass,
No man now.

The picture of the final conflagration of the Judgment Day is perhaps
over-laboured, a descriptive _tour de force_, horror piled upon horror
with accumulative power,--a picture somewhat too much in the manner of
Martin; and the verse does not lend itself to the sustained sublimity of
terror. The glow of Milton's hell is intenser, and Milton's majestic
instrumentation alone could render the voices of its flames. The real
awfulness of Browning's Jud