"Is not God now i' the world His power first made? Is not his love at issue still with sin,

Visibly when a wrong is done on earth?"

This conquering power of love is the key-note of Browning's religion. According to Browning, love is God, service is the Son of God, courage is the Spirit of God; and so far and so often as these great qualities come into human life, God becomes therein reincarnated, "blending the quality of man with the quality of God." And as far and as often as that comes to pass, the triumph of good over evil is accomplished, and the divinity and supremacy of love established on the throne of the moral universe.

7

To Browning's thought, God is not the miraculous deliverer of the weaklings and the sentimentalists out of all their troubles, but the strong helper of those who strenuously strive to help themselves. If you have been able to work good out of these finite conditions, then and not otherwise the promise of the Infinite is yours. Hence it is with the confidence with which a brave soldier turns to a powerful ally that Browning looks up to God.

"Therefore to whom turn I but to Thee, the ineffable Name?

Builder and maker, Thou, of houses not made with hands!

What, have fear of change from Thee who art ever the same?

Doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy Power expands?

There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;

The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound; What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;

On the earths the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round.

"All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist;

Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power

Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist

When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.

The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,

The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard; Enough that he heard it once; we shall hear it by-andby."

Having given rules for the art of pessimism, I suppose I ought to be equally explicit in regard to optimism. I will here again adopt the easily rememberable form in which the rules for pessimism were cast. Indeed, the rules for optimism are simply the inverse of the rules for pessimism.

Live in the active voice; intent on what you can do rather than on what happens to you: in the indicative mood; concerned with facts as they are rather than as they might be in the present tense; concentrated on the duty in hand, without regret for the past or worry about the future in the first person; criticising yourself rather than condemning others: in the singular number; seek

"For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crost the bar."

That is inexpressibly beautiful; yet it is in spirit not so very far beyond what the average man attains. It is the greatest of anything born of woman; this serene and simple trust in a Power outside us and beyond us, which will, in ways we cannot understand, take care of us when we have passed beyond this bourne of time and space. Yet as Jesus said about John the Baptist: He that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than the greatest of those who stand outside and prophesy its coming; so the power to carry the very spirit of the kingdom within one's self, so that he could make even a hell into a heaven by the light of love he would shed abroad throughout it, were he ever banished there, is the greatest note of modern philosophic intuition and spiritual insight.

This deeper note of the invincible, conquering power of the love within his own breast we get in Browning's "Epilogue." Browning, here, as everywhere, must needs imply a situation, and introduce a third party, to give dramatic setting to his words. His poem addresses the fond friends whom he will leave behind, some of whom may be so foolish and mistaken as to mourn for him as for one whom some sad misfortune has overtaken, and even to pity him on account of this calamity; do, in short, what Socrates reproved Crito for doing, and what, unless forewarned, we should all be tempted to do for one we loved, but whose spiritual greatness we had been unable to understand. Browning's "Epilogue" is a gentle re

proof to these fond but mistaken friends, and the assurance to them, and to all the world, that a soul which has once learned to live in the active exercise of love can never be conquered or cast down in this world, or in any other. I once heard the poem from the lips of one of the few men worthy to repeat it: from Nansen, in answer to the question, "What is the good of all this risk of exploration, when one might be quite comfortable at home?" > It is the great battle-song of spiritual exploration; the shout of triumph of victorious optimism. I am sure that the reading of this in close connection with those exquisite lines of Tennyson will show wherein Browning differs from the very best and highest that modern faith has reached; and that, compared to a soul which carries within itself the victorious principle of the divine love, even the sweetest hope, and the serenest faith, is " as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine."

Without further introduction, the poem shall speak for itself:

66 EPILOGUE.

To Apalands.

"At the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time,

When you set your fancies free,

Will they pass to where- by death, fools think, imprisoned

Low he lies who once so loved you, whom you loved so, Pity me?

"Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken!

What had I on earth to do

With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly?

Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel

Being- who?

"One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,

Never doubted clouds would break,

Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,

Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,

Sleep to wake.

"No, at noonday in the bustle of man's work-time Greet the unseen with a cheer!

Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, "Strive and thrive!' cry Speed, - fight on, fare ever There as here!'"