these principles are only latent, and are
far from holding undisputed sway. Browning was, at first, restrained
from exclusive devotion to abstract views, by the suggestions which the
artistic spirit receives through its immediate contact with the facts of
life. That contact it is very difficult for philosophy to maintain as it
pursues its effort after universal truth. Philosophy is obliged to
analyze in order to define, and, in that process, it is apt to lose
something of that completeness of representation, which belongs to art.
For art is always engaged in presenting the universal in the form of a
particular object of beauty. Its product is a "known unknown," but the
unknown is the unexhausted reality of a fact of intuition. Nor can
analysis ever exhaust it; theory can never catch up art, or explain all
that is in it. On similar grounds, it may be shown that it is impossible
for reason to lay bare all the elements that enter into its first
complex product, which we call faith. In religion, as in art, man is
aware of more than he knows; his articulate logic cannot do justice to
all the truths of the "heart." "The supplementary reflux of light" of
philosophy cannot "illustrate all the inferior grades" of knowledge. Man
will never completely understand himself.

"I knew, I felt, (perception unexpressed,
Uncomprehended by our narrow thought,
But somehow felt and known in every shift
And change in the spirit,--nay, in every pore
Of the body, even,)--what God is, what we are,
What life is--how God tastes an infinite joy
In infinite ways--one everlasting bliss,
From whom all being emanates, all power
Proceeds."[A]

[Footnote A: _Paracelsus_.]

I believe that it is possible, by the help of the intuitions of
Browning's highest artistic period, to bring together again the elements
of his broken faith, and to find in them suggestions of a truer
philosophy of life than anything which the poet himself achieved.
Perhaps, indeed, it is not easy, nor altogether fair, to press the
passionate utterances of his religious rapture into the service of
metaphysics, and to treat the unmeasured language of emotion as the
expression of a definite doctrine. Nevertheless, rather than set forth a
new defence of the faith, which his agnosticism left exposed to the
assaults of doubt and denial, it is better to make Browning correct his
own errors, and to appeal from the metaphysician to the poet, from the
sobriety of the lo