ng
directly upon the truth as God sees it, now a coloured lens, presenting
truth in blurred refraction, now an opaque mirror idly bodying forth his
futile and illusive dreams.

[Footnote 137: _Paracelsus_.]

[Footnote 138: _Fifine_, cxxiv.]

These conflicting views were rooted in different elements of Browning's
many-sided nature. His vivid intuition of his own self-consciousness
formed a standing type of seemingly absolute immediate knowledge, to
which he stubbornly clung. When the optimism of the "Head" was
discredited, passion-fraught instinct, under the name of the Heart, came
to the rescue, and valiantly restored its authority. On the other hand,
a variety of subtle attractions drew him on to give "illusion" a wider
and wider scope. Sheer joy in battle had no small share. The immortal
and infinite soul, projected among the shows of sense, could not be
expected to do its part worthily if it saw through them: it had to
believe its enemies real enemies, and its warfare a rational warfare; it
had to accept time and place, and good and evil, as the things they
seem. To have a perfectly clear vision of truth as it is in God was to
be dazzled with excess of light, to grope and fumble about the world as
it is for man, like the risen Lazarus--

"witless of the size, the sum,
The value in proportion of all things,
Or whether it be little or be much."

The mystic who withdrew from the struggle with phantoms to gaze upon
eternal realities was himself the victim of the worst illusions; while
the hero who plunged into that struggle was training his soul, and
thereby getting a grip upon ultimate truth. Thus Browning's passionate
and reiterated insistence upon the illusiveness of knowledge was rooted
in his inalienable faith in the worth and reality of moral conflict. The
infinite soul realised itself most completely when it divested itself of
the trappings of its infinity, and it worked out God's law most
implicitly when it ignored God's point of view.

V.

Such a result could not be finally satisfying, and Browning's thought
fastened with increasing predilection and exclusiveness upon one intense
kind of vitality in which the hard antagonism of good and evil seems to
be transcended, and that complete immersion of the soul in a nature not
its own appears not as self-abnegation but as self-fulfilment. He did
not himself use this phraseology about Love; it is that of a school to
which he, at no