senting various persons
in discussion, the individual views of each being brought out. The analogy
of this to the treatment of the Franceschini tragedy in his son's great
poem is rather interesting to contemplate. With the poet it was less
dramatic interest in the crime, _per se_, than it was that the
complexities of crime afforded the basis from which to work out his
central and controlling purpose, his abiding and profound conviction that
life here is simply the experimental and preparatory stage for the life to
come; that all its events, even its lapses from the right, its fall into
terrible evil, are--

"Machinery just meant
To give thy soul its bent,"

a part of the mechanism to "try the soul's stuff on"; that man lives in an
environment of spiritual influences which act upon him in just that degree
to which he can recognize and respond to them; and that he must sometimes
learn the ineffable blessedness of the right through tragic experiences of
the wrong. In the very realities of man's imperfection Browning sees his
possibilities of

"Progress, man's distinctive work alone."

When Browning asks:

"And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence
For the fullness of the days?..."

he condenses in these lines his philosophy of life.

Many of the poems appearing in the "Dramatis Personae" had already been
written: "Gold Hair" and "James Lee's Wife" at Pornic, and others at green
Cambo. In the splendor and power of "Abt Vogler," "Rabbi Ben Ezra," and
"A Death in the Desert," the poet expressed a philosophy that again
suggests his intuitive agreement with the Hegelian. "Rabbi Ben Ezra" holds
in absolute solution the Vedanta philosophy. To the question as to what
all this enigma of life means, the poet answers:

"Thence shall I pass, approved
A man, for aye removed
From the developed brute; a god though in the germ.

* * * * *

He fixed thee 'mid this dance
Of plastic circumstance,
This Present, thou, forsooth, would fain arrest."

How keen the sense of humor and of the sharp contrasts of life in "Fra
Lippo Lippi," and what power of character analysis. The intellectual vigor
and the keen insight into the play of mental action in "Bishop Blougram's
Apology"--a poem that occasioned great discussion on its appearance (from
a real or fancied resemblance of the "Bishop" to Cardinal Wiseman)--are
almost unsurpassed in poetic literature. Many of the poem