other poet of the century had
given it. And here, too, the mystic and the positive strains of
Browning's genius wrought together, impressing themselves equally in
that wonderful Browningesque universe in which every germ seems to be
itself a universe "needing but a look to burst into immense life," and
infinity is ever at hand, behind a closed door. The whole of his
theology was an attempt to express consistently two convictions, rarely
found of the same intensity in the same brain, of the divineness of the
universe and the individuality of man.

The mechanical Creator of Paley and the deists could never have
satisfied him. From the first he "saw God everywhere." There was in him
the stuff of which the "God-intoxicated" men are made, and he had
moments, like that expressed in one of his most deliberate and emphatic
personal utterances, in which all existence seemed to be the visible
Face of God--

"Become my universe that feels and knows."[130]

[Footnote 130: _Epilogue_.]

He clearly strained towards the sublime pantheistic imaginings of the
great poets of the previous generation,--Wordsworth's "Something far
more deeply interfused," Shelley's "One spirit's plastic stress," and
Goethe's _Erdgeist_, who weaves the eternal vesture of God at the loom
of Time. The dying vision of Paracelsus is as sublime as these, and
marks Browning's nearest point of approach to the ways of thought they
embody. In all the vitalities of the world, from the uncouth play of the
volcano to the heaven-and-earth transfiguring mind of man, God was
present, sharing their joy. But even here the psychological barrier is
apparent, against which all the surge of pantheistic impulse in Browning
broke in vain. This God of manifold joys was sharply detached from his
universe; he was a sensitive and sympathetic spectator, not a pervading
spirit. In every direction human personality opposed rigid frontiers
which even the infinite God could not pass, and no poet less needed the
stern warning which he addressed to German speculation against the
"gigantic stumble"[131] of making them one. The mystic's dream of
seeing all things in God, the Hegelian thesis of a divine mind realising
itself in and through the human, found no lodgment in a consciousness of
mosaic-like clearness dominated by the image of an incisively individual
and indivisible self. In later life the sharp lines which he drew from
the first about individual personality became a ring-f