ence within which
each man "cultivated his plot,"[132] managing independently as he might
the business of his soul. The divine love might wind inextricably about
him,[133] the dance of plastic circumstance at the divine bidding
impress its rhythms upon his life,[134] he retained his human identity
inviolate, a "point of central rock" amid the welter of the waves.[135]
His love might be a "spark from God's fire," but it was his own, to use
as he would; he "stood on his own stock of love and power."[136]

[Footnote 131: _Christmas-Eve._]

[Footnote 132: _Ferishtah_.]

[Footnote 133: _Easter-Day_.]

[Footnote 134: _Rabbi ben Ezra_.]

[Footnote 135: _Epilogue_.]

[Footnote 136: _Christmas-Eve_.]

IV.

In this sharp demarcation of man's being from God's, Browning never
faltered. On the contrary, the individualising animus which there found
expression impelled him to raise more formidable barriers about man, and
to turn the ring-fence which secured him from intrusion into a high wall
which cut off his view. In other words, the main current of Browning's
thought sets strongly towards a sceptical criticism of human knowledge.
At the outset he stands on the high _a priori_ ground of Plato. Truth in
its fulness abides in the soul, an "imprisoned splendour," which
intellect quickened by love can elicit, which moments of peculiar
insight, deep joy, and sorrow, and the coming on of death, can release.
But the gross flesh hems it in, wall upon wall, "a baffling and
perverting carnal mesh,"[137] the source of all error. The process of
discovery he commonly conceived as an advance through a succession of
Protean disguises of truth, each "one grade above its last
presentment,"[138] until, at the rare moment, by the excepted eye, the
naked truth was grasped. But Browning became steadily more reluctant to
admit that these fortunate moments ever occurred, that the Proteus was
ever caught. Things would be known to the soul as they were known to God
only when it was emancipated by death. Infinity receded into an ever
more inaccessible remoteness from the finite. For the speaker in
_Christmas-Eve_ man's mind was the image of God's, reflecting trace for
trace his absolute knowledge; for Francis Furini the bare fact of his
own existence is all he knows, a narrow rock-spit of knowledge enisled
in a trackless ocean of ignorance. Thus for Browning, in differing moods
and contexts, the mind of man becomes now a transparent pane, openi