“Machinery just meant
To give thy soul its bent,”
a part of the mechanism to “try the soul’s stuff on”; that man lives in an environment of spiritual influences which act upon him in just that degree to which he can recognize and respond to them; and that he must sometimes learn the ineffable blessedness of the right through tragic experiences of the wrong. In the very realities of man’s imperfection Browning sees his possibilities of
“Progress, man’s distinctive work alone.”
When Browning asks:
“And what is our failure here but a triumph’s evidence
For the fullness of the days?...”
he condenses in these lines his philosophy of life.
Many of the poems appearing in the “Dramatis Personæ” had already been written: “Gold Hair” and “James Lee’s Wife” at Pornic, and others at green Cambo. In the splendor and power of “Abt Vogler,” “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” and “A Death in the Desert,” the poet expressed a philosophy that again suggests his intuitive agreement with the Hegelian. “Rabbi Ben Ezra” holds in absolute solution the Vedanta philosophy. To the question as to what all this enigma of life means, the poet answers:
“Thence shall I pass, approved
A man, for aye removed
From the developed brute; a god though in the germ.
······
He fixed thee ’mid this dance
Of plastic circumstance,
This Present, thou, forsooth, would fain arrest.”
How keen the sense of humor and of the sharp contrasts of life in “Fra Lippo Lippi,” and what power of character analysis. The intellectual vigor and the keen insight into the play of mental action in “Bishop Blougram’s Apology”—a poem that occasioned great discussion on its appearance (from a real or fancied resemblance of the “Bishop” to Cardinal Wiseman)—are almost unsurpassed in poetic literature. Many of the poems in the “Dramatis Personæ” are aglow with the romance of life, as in the “Eurydice to Orpheus,” and “A Face,” which refers to Emily Patmore. There are studio traces as well in these, and in the “Deaf and Dumb,” suggested by a group of Woolner. The crowning power of all is revealed in the noble faith and the exquisite tenderness of “Prospice,” especially in those closing lines when all of fear and pain and darkness and cold,—
“Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!”