does not mean
the immanence of power, and will, and love. He can pass
with ready sympathy into the mystical feeling of the East,
where in the unclouded sky, in the torrent of noonday light,
God is so near

`He glows above
With scarce an intervention, presses close
And palpitatingly, His soul o'er ours.'

But the wisdom of a Western `savant' who in his superior intellectuality
replaces the will of God by the blind force of nature,
seems to Mr. Browning to be science falsely so called,
a new ignorance founded upon knowledge,

`A lamp's death when, replete with oil, it chokes.'

To this effect argues the prophet John in `A Death in the Desert',
anticipating with the deep prevision of a dying man the doubts
and questionings of modern days. And in the third of those
remarkable poems which form the epilogue of the `Dramatis Personae',
the whole world rises in the speaker's imagination into one vast
spiritual temple, in which voices of singers, and swell of trumpets,
and cries of priests are heard going up to God no less truly
than in the old Jewish worship, while the face of Christ,
instinct with divine will and love, becomes apparent,
as that of which all nature is a type or an adumbration."
--Prof. Edward Dowden in his Comparative Study of Browning and Tennyson
(Studies in Literature, 1789-1877).
--

"But if, appealing thence, he cower, avouch
He is mere man, and in humility
Neither may know God nor mistake himself;
I point to the immediate consequence
And say, by such confession straight he falls {575}
Into man's place, a thing nor God nor beast,
Made to know that he can know and not more:
Lower than God who knows all and can all,
Higher than beasts which know and can so far
As each beast's limit, perfect to an end, {580}
Nor conscious that they know, nor craving more;
While man knows partly but conceives beside,
Creeps ever on from fancies to the fact,
And in this striving, this converting air
Into a solid he may grasp and use, {585}
Finds progress, man's distinctive mark alone,
Not God's, and not the beasts': God is, they are,
Man partly is and wholly hopes to be.
Such progress could no more attend his soul
Were all it struggles after found at first {590}
And guesses changed to knowledge absolute,
Than motion wait his body, we