"It is the good of dreams

so soon they go.

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Wake in a horror of heart-beats, you may

6

Cry, The dread thing will never from my thoughts!'
Still, a few daylight doses of plain life,

Cock-crow and sparrow-chirp, or bleat and bell

Of goats that trot by, tinkling, to be milked;

And when you rub your eyes awake and wide,

Where is the harm o' the horror? Gone! So here.
I know I wake, but from what? Blank, I say!
This is the note of evil: for good lasts."

She interprets all the wrong she suffered as blindness blindness of well-meaning love in her foster-mother; blindness of ignorance in herself; blindness of hate, in her husband, for "hate was the truth of him."

"Being right now, I am happy and color things.
Yes, everybody that leaves life sees all
Softened and bettered: so with other sights:

To me at least was never evening yet

But seemed far beautifuller than its day,

For past is past."

Her life goes out in courage, born of love to her noble rescuer; she is serene, triumphant, hopeful, blessed.

"Could we by a wish

Have what we will and get the future now,

Would we wish aught done undone in the past?"

For her lover she leaves the cheerful, heroic words:

"So let him wait God's instant men call years;
Meantime hold hard by truth and his great soul,

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Do out the duty! Through such souls alone
God, stooping, shows sufficient of His light
For us i' the dark to rise by. And I rise."

The art of optimism, you see, lies in laying all emphasis, not on what has happened to us, or is to happen, but on some end and aim which runs through all our experience, and gives to our activity a worthy goal, and to ourselves abundant exercise and growth.

"I count life just a stuff

To try the soul's strength on, educe the man.

Who keeps one end in view makes all things serve,"

as we are told "In a Balcony."

And again this secret of optimism is beautifully set forth in that great passage from "Colombe's Birthday," which is perhaps the best single expression of Browning's point of view:

"He gathers earth's whole good into his arms;
Standing as man now, stately, strong, and wise,
Marching to fortune, not surprised by her.
One great aim, like a guiding star, above-
Which tasks strength, wisdom, stateliness, to lift
His manhood to the height that takes the prize;
A prize not near-lest overlooking earth
He rashly spring to seize it- nor remote,
So that he rests upon his path content.

But day by day, while shimmering grows shine,
And the faint circlet prophesies the orb,
He sees so much as, just evolving these,
The stateliness, the wisdom, and the strength,
To due completion, will suffice this life,
And lead him at his grandest to the grave."

Canley

wo

What is this but the old doctrine, first clearly enunciated in Aristotle's Ethics, that man is essentially an active being; and that his only satisfaction is to be found in the harmonious development of all his powers in due proportion. To realize the proper end of one's being, and to find one's joy in ever closer approximation to the unattainable ideal; this is what in abstract form Aristotle taught the philosophic few in antiquity; this is the lesson Browning is drawing in a multitude of characters and situations, so that all who care enough for the truth about life to dig for it underneath the difficulty of his writings, may read and understand.

Yet not every end will satisfy. As we are told in Browning's earlier poems, not the "principle of restlessness," as in "Pauline,” not knowledge alone, as in "Paracelsus," not intensity of action, apart from some human good served and attained, as in "Sordello," is sufficient to neet heet the demand of the soul for an end as great as itself. Paracelsus explains the failure of mere knowledge, because

"In my own heart love had not been made wise
To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind,

To know even hate is but a mask of love's

To see a good in evil and a hope

In ill-success."

And his awakening consists in the recognition that man's true end is that devotion to other souls which < henceforth he calls "love."

"Love, hope, fear, faith-these make humanity."

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This, then, is Browning's final solution of life's problem. Man's good is found in the active exercise of all his powers for a worthy end; and since no end is worthy of his efforts which is lower than himself, or less than personal, therefore devotion to persons, divine or human, good or bad, in other words, love, is "God's secret" of a happy life.

There is no good of life but love - but love!

What else looks good is some shade flung from love.
Love gilds it, gives it worth. Be warned by me,
Never you cheat yourself one instant! Love,

Give love, ask only love, and leave the rest."

"For the loving worm within its clod

Were diviner than a loveless God

Amid his worlds, I will dare to say."

"For life, with all it yields of joy and woe,
And hope and fear, believe the aged friend,
Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love,
How love might be, hath been, indeed, and is;
And that we hold thenceforth to the uttermost
Such prize despite the envy of the world,

And, having gained truth, keep truth; that is all."

"Love," however, is a word with such sentimental associations that a little digression is here necessary, in order to show what a profound philosophy and what a resolute temper are included in the virile and robust attitude of mind and heart which Browning indicates, as Jesus and Paul had done before him, by this word "love."

Everything, every situation is made up of many elements. These elements are in themselves neither good

nor bad, but indifferent. place and performs its function as to conform to the idea and promote the end of the whole of which it is a part, then that element becomes good. When, on the other hand, an element gets out of place, and resists the purpose of the whole to which it properly belongs, then it becomes bad. Good, therefore, is fitness; badness is unfitness.

When an element so takes its

Now, the fundamental law of nature, or natural selection, as it is called, allows only the survival of the fittest. All that is unfit is by virtue of its unfitness already on the high road to extinction. The best always wins in the struggle for existence. The struggle is keen and cruel often; but the outcome is bound to be the survival of the fittest. Optimism, of this robust fighting kind, is written into the very constitution of the universe. The opposite of this principle, the permanent survival and triumph of the unfit, is simply inconceivable. A world in which everything was unfit, every particle arrayed in hopeless antagonism to every other, would be not a cosmos, but a chaos. On the inorganic plane evil is absolutely impossible. In organic life it first enters in the form of disease; which is nothing but the refusal of some part of an organism to fulfil the function assigned to it by the law of the organism. If this disease assumes too great proportions, nature simply wipes it out, taking the organism with it, by the swift, sure, merciless, but beneficent messenger of death. It is better that the diseased animal should die quickly, and give its room and food to a sound and healthy organism which stands ready to take its place. Thus the beneficence of natural selection, even though swift death be its chosen agency, is clear and unmistakable.