German Boehme, with his affinities for the abstract,
never cared for plants until, one day, he noticed they could speak;
that the daisy colloquized with the cowslip on SUCH themes!
themes found extant in Jacob's prose. But when life's summer passes
while reading prose in that tough book he wrote, getting some sense
or other out of it, who helps, then, to repair our loss?
Another Boehme, say you, with a tougher book and subtler
abstract meanings of what roses say? Or some stout Mage like
John of Halberstadt, who MADE THINGS Boehme WROTE THOUGHTS about?
Ah, John's the man for us! who instead of giving us the wise talk
of roses, scatters all around us the roses themselves,
pouring heaven into this shut house of life. So come,
the harp back to your heart again, instead of speaking dry words
across its strings. Your own boy-face bent over the finer chords,
and following the cherub at the top that points to God
with his paired half-moon wings, is a far better poem than your poem
with all its naked thoughts.

Apparent Failure.

The poet, it appears, speaks here in his own person.
Sauntering about Paris, he comes upon the Doric little Morgue,
the dead-house, where they show their drowned. He enters,
and sees through the screen of glass, the bodies of three men
who committed suicide, the day before, by drowning themselves in the Seine.

In the last stanza, he gives expression to his hopeful philosophy,
which recognizes "some soul of goodness, in things evil"; *
which sees in human nature, "potentiality of final deliverance
from the evil in it, given only time enough for the work".
In this age of professed and often, no doubt, affected,
agnosticism and pessimism, Browning is the foremost apostle of Hope.
He, more than any other great author of the age, whether philosopher,
or poet, or divine, has been inspired with the faith that

"a sun will pierce
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched;
That, after Last, returns the First,
Though a wide compass round be fetched;
That what began best, can't end worst,
Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst."

--
* `Henry V.', IV. 1. 4.
--

Compare with this, the following stanzas from Tennyson's `In Memoriam',
Section 54:--

"Oh yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood.

That nothing walks with