his waggon; that heaven is occupied in
catering for his appetite and becoming an accomplice in his sins.
Sludge's spiritual world was genuine for him, but it had nothing but the
name in common with that of the poet of Ben Ezra, and of the _Epilogue_
which immediately follows.[44]

[Footnote 44: The foregoing account assumes that the poem was not
written, as is commonly supposed, in Florence in 1859-60, but after his
settlement in London. The only ground for the current view is Mrs
Browning's mention of his having been "working at a long poem" that
winter (_Letters_, May 18, 1860). I am enabled, by the kindness of Prof.
Hall Griffin, to state that an unpublished letter from Browning to
Buchanan in 1871 shows this "long poem" to have been one on Napoleon
III. (cf. above, p. 90). Some of it probably appears in _Hohenstiel
Schwangau_.]

This _Epilogue_ is one of the few utterances in which Browning draws the
ambiguous dramatic veil from his personal faith. That he should choose
this moment of parting with the reader for such a confession confirms
one's impression that the focus of his interest in poetry now, more than
ever before, lay among those problems of life and death, of God and man,
to which nearly all the finest work of this collection is devoted. Far
more emphatically than in the analogous _Christmas-Eve_, Browning
resolves not only the negations of critical scholarship but the dogmatic
affirmations of the Churches into symptoms of immaturity in the
understanding of spiritual things; in the knowledge how heaven's high
with earth's low should intertwine. The third speaker voices the
manifold protest of the nineteenth century against all theologies built
upon an aloofness of the divine and human, whether the aloof God could
be reached by special processes and ceremonies, or whether he was a bare
abstraction, whose "pale bliss" never thrilled in response to human
hearts. The best comment upon his faith is the saying of Meredith, "The
fact that character can be and is developed by the clash of
circumstances is to me a warrant for infinite hope."[45] Only, for
Browning, that "infinite hope" translates itself into a sense of present
divine energies bending all the clashing circumstance to its benign end,
till the walls of the world take on the semblance of the shattered
Temple, and the crowded life within them the semblance of the seemingly
vanished Face, which

"far from vanish, rather grows,
Or decomp