are
as cultivable as are any other elements of our complex nature,
and which, too, may be blunted beyond a consciousness
of their possession. And when one in this latter state
denies the reality of faith, he is not unlike one born blind
denying the reality of sight.

A reiterated lesson in Browning's poetry, and one that results from
his spiritual theory, is, that the present life is a tabernacle-life,
and that it can be truly lived only as a tabernacle-life;
for only such a life is compatible with the ever-continued
aspiration and endeavor which is a condition of, and inseparable from,
spiritual vitality.

Domizia, in the tragedy of `Luria', is made to say:--

"How inexhaustibly the spirit grows!
One object, she seemed erewhile born to reach
With her whole energies and die content,--
So like a wall at the world's edge it stood,
With naught beyond to live for,--is that reached?--
Already are new undream'd energies
Outgrowing under, and extending farther
To a new object;--there's another world!"

The dying John in `A Death in the Desert', is made to say:--

"I say that man was made to grow, not stop;
That help he needed once, and needs no more,
Having grown up but an inch by, is withdrawn:
For he hath new needs, and new helps to these.
This imports solely, man should mount on each
New height in view; the help whereby he mounts,
The ladder-rung his foot has left, may fall,
Since all things suffer change save God the Truth.
Man apprehends him newly at each stage
Whereat earth's ladder drops, its service done;
And nothing shall prove twice what once was proved."

And again:--

"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,
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
And guesses changed to knowledge absolute,
Than motion wait his body, were all else
Than it the solid earth on every side,
Where now through space he moves from rest to rest.
Man, therefore, thus conditioned, must expect
He could not, what he knows now, know at first;
What he considers that he knows to-day,
Come but to-morrow, he will find misknown;
Getting inc