“Here and there did England help me,—how can I help England?”—say,
Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise and pray,
While Jove’s planet rises yonder, silent over Africa.’”
There was a hearty response to Harry’s effort, and then Miss Alida’s favorite minister—who had been silent during the whole discussion, much to her disappointment—spoke.
“A poet’s nature,” he said, “needs that high reverence which is to the spirit what iron is to the blood; it needs, most of all, the revelation of Christianity, because of its peculiar temptations, doubts, fears, yearnings, and obstinate questionings. Mr. Browning has this reverence, and accepts this revelation. He is 262 not half-ashamed, as are some poets, to mention God and Christ; and he never takes the name of either in vain. He does not set up a kind of pantheistic worship. No one has ever told us, as Browning has in his poem of ‘Christmas Eve and Easter Day,’ how hard it is to be a Christian. Do you remember its tremendous dream of the Judgment Day:
‘When through the black dome of the firmament,
Sudden there went,
Like horror and astonishment,
A fierce vindictive scribble of red
Quick flame across; as if one said