falsehood's fancy haze? I choose the first."

It is an old man's effort to make the best of age. For my part, I do not
see that the things are the better for losing the colour the soul gives
them. The things themselves are indifferent. But as seen by the soul,
they are seen in God, and the colour and light which imagination gives
them are themselves divine. Nor is their colour or light only in our
imagination, but in themselves also, part of the glory and beauty of
God. A flower is never only a flower, or a beast a beast. And so
Browning would have said in the days when he was still a lover of Nature
as well as of man, when he was still a faithful soldier in the army of
imagination, a poet more than a philosopher at play. It is a sad
business. He has not lost his eagerness to advance, to climb beyond the
flaming walls, to find God in his heaven. He has not lost the great
hopes with which he began, nor the ideals he nursed of old. He has not
lost his fighting power, nor his cheerful cry that life is before him in
the fulness of the world to come. The _Reverie_ and the _Epilogue_ to
_Asolando_ are noble statements of his courage, faith, and joy. There is
nothing sad there, nothing to make us beat the breast. But there is
sadness in this abandonment of the imaginative glory with which once he
clothed the world of Nature; and he ought to have retained it. He would
have done so had he not forgotten Nature in anatomising man.

However, he goes on with his undying effort to make the best of things,
and though he has lost his rapture in Nature, he has not lost his main
theory of man's life and of the use of the universe. The end of this
_Prologue_ puts it as clearly as it was put in _Paracelsus_. Nothing is
changed in that.

"At Asolo," he continues, "my Asolo, when I was young, all natural
objects were palpably clothed with fire. They mastered me, not I them.
Terror was in their beauty. I was like Moses before the Bush that
burned. I adored the splendour I saw. Then I was in danger of being
content with it; of mistaking the finite for the infinite beauty. To be
satisfied--that was the peril. Now I see the natural world as it is,
without the rainbow hues the soul bestowed upon it. Is that well? In one
sense yes.

And now? The lambent flame is--where?
Lost from the naked world: earth, sky,
Hill, vale, tree, flower--Italia's rare
O'er-running beauty crowds the eye--
But flame?--The Bush is bare.

Al