nse. The defect she saw in M. Thiers was "a lack of breadth of
view, which helped to bring the situation to a dead lock, on which the
French had no choice than to sweep the board clean and begin again."

It was during this early winter, with French politics and French society
and occasional spectacles and processions extending from the Carrousel to
the Arc de l'Etoile, that Browning wrote that essay on Shelley, which his
publisher of that time, Mr. Moxon, had requested to accompany a series of
Shelley letters which had been discovered, but which were afterward found
to be fraudulent. The edition was at once suppressed; but a few copies had
already gone out, and, as Professor Dowden says, "The essay is interesting
as Browning's only considerable piece of prose;... for him the poet of
'Prometheus Unbound' was not that beautiful and ineffectual angel of
Matthew Arnold's fancy, beating in the void his luminous wings. A great
moral purpose looked forth from Shelley's work, as it does from all lofty
works of art." It was "the dream of boyhood," Browning tells us, to render
justice to Shelley; and he availed himself of this opportunity with
alluring eagerness. His interpretation of Shelley is singularly noble and
in accord with all the great spiritual teachings of his own poetic work.
Browning's plea that there is no basis for any adequate estimate of
Shelley, who "died before his youth was ended," cannot but commend its
justice; and he urges that in any measurement of Shelley as a man he must
be contemplated "at his ultimate spiritual stature" and not judged by the
mistakes of ten years before when in his entire immaturity of character.

How all that infinite greatness of spirit and almost divine breadth of
comprehension that characterize Robert Browning reveal themselves in this
estimate of Shelley. It is seeing human errors and mistakes as God sees
them,--the temporary faults, defects, imperfections of the soul on its
onward way to perfection. This was the attitude of Browning's profoundest
convictions regarding human life.

"Eternal process moving on;
From state to state the spirit walks."

This achievement of the divine ideal for man is not within the
possibilities of the brief sojourn on earth, but what does the transition
called death do for man but to

"Interpose at the difficult moment, snatch Saul, the mistake,
Saul, the failure, the ruin he seems now,--and bid him awake
From the dream, the probation,