ense, impatient of the
nonsense of the thing, may be the salvation of the average man. It is
often the clever people who would be entirely rational and unprejudiced
that best succeed in duping themselves at once by their reason and their
folly. A fine old crusted prejudice commonly stands for a thousand acts
of judgment amassed into a convenient working result; a single act of an
individual understanding, or several of such acts, will seldom contain
an equal sum of wisdom. Scientific discovery is not advanced by a
multitude of curious and ingenious amateurs in learned folly. Whether
the claims of spiritualism are warrantable or fallacious, Mrs Browning,
gifted as she was with rare powers of mind, was not qualified to
investigate those claims; it was a waste of energy, from which she could
not but suffer serious risks and certain loss.

Before she had seen anything for herself she was a believer--a believer,
as she describes it, on testimony. The fact of communication with the
invisible world appeared to her more important than anything that had
been communicated. The spirits themselves "seem abundantly foolish, one
must admit." Yet it was clear to her that mankind was being prepared for
some great development of truth. She would keep her eyes wide open to
facts and her soul lifted up in reverential expectation. By-and-by she
felt the dumb wood of the table panting and shivering with human
emotion. The dogmatism of Faraday in an inadequate theory was simply
unscientific, a piece of intellectual tyranny. The American medium Home,
she learnt from her friends, was "turning the world upside down in
London with this spiritual influx." Two months later, in July 1855, Mrs
Browning and her husband were themselves in London, and witnessed Home's
performances during a seance at Ealing. Miss de Gaudrion (afterwards Mrs
Merrifield), who was present on that occasion, and who was convinced
that the "manifestations" were a fraud, wrote to Mrs Browning for an
expression of her opinion. The reply, as might be expected, declared the
writer's belief in the genuine character of the phenomena; such
manifestations, she admitted, in the undeveloped state of the subject
were "apt to be low"; but they were, she was assured, "the beginning of
access from a spiritual world, of which we shall presently learn more
perhaps." A letter volunteered by Browning accompanied that of his wife.
He had, he said, to overcome a real repugnance in recalling the s