atthew Arnold, the epoch of concentration which follows an epoch of
expansion. But the embrace of earth and the things of earth is like the
embrace, with a pathos in its ardour, which precedes a farewell. From
the first he had recognised the danger on the one hand of settling down
to browse contentedly in the paddock of our earthly life, and on the
other hand the danger of ignoring our limitations, the danger of
attempting to "thrust in earth eternity's concerns." In his earlier
years he had chiefly feared the first of these two dangers, and even
while pointing out, as in _Paracelsus_, the errors of the seeker for
absolute knowledge or for absolute love, he had felt a certain sympathy
with such glorious transgressors. He had valued more than any positive
acquisitions of knowledge those "grasps of guess, which pull the more
into the less." Now such guesses, such hopes were as precious to him as
ever, but he set more store than formerly by the
certainties--certainties even if illusions--of the general heart of man.
These are the forms of thought and feeling divinely imposed upon us; we
cannot do better than to accept them; but we must accept them only as
provisional, as part of our education on earth, as a needful rung of the
ladder by which we may climb to higher things. And the faith which leads
to such acquiescence also results in the acceptance of hopes as things
not be struggled for but rested in as a substantial portion of the
divine order of our lives. In autumn come for spirits rightly attuned
these pellucid halcyon days of the Indian summer.

In _Jocoseria_, which appeared in Browning's seventy-first year (1883),
he shows nothing of his boisterous humour, but smiles at our human
infirmities from the heights of experience. The prop of Israel, the
much-enlightened master, "Eximious Jochanan Ben Sabbathai," when his
last hour is at hand has to confess that all his wisdom of life lies in
his theoric; in practice he is still an infant; striving presumptuously
in boyhood to live an angel, now that he comes to die he is hardly a
man. And Solomon himself is no more than man; the truth-compelling ring
extorts the confession that an itch of vanity still tickles and teazes
him; the Queen of Sheba, seeker for wisdom and patroness of culture,
after all likes wisdom best when its exponents are young men tall and
proper, and prefers to the solution of the riddles of life by elderly
monarchs one small kiss from a fool. Lilith in