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PROPHECY AND POETRY

PROPHECY AND POETRY
STUDIES IN ISAIAH AND
BROWNING
€I)e 25ot)ien %tctmt^ for 1909

BY

ARTHUR ROGERS
author of
" Men and Movements in the English Church '

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
91 AND 93 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
LONDON, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
1909

Copyright, igog.
By Longmans, Green, and Co.

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE U.S.A.

To C. A. R.

THE
JOHN BOHLEN LECTURESHIP
John Bohlen, who died in this city on the
twenty-sixth day of April, 1874, bequeathed to
trustees a fund of one hundred thousand dollars,
to be distributed to religious and charitable objects
in accordance with the well-known wishes of the
testator. By a deed of trust, executed June 2, 1875, the
trustees under the will of Mr. Bohlen transferred
and paid over to " The Rector, Church Wardens,
and Vestrymen of the Church of the Holy Trinity,
Philadelphia," in trust, a sum of money for certain
designated purposes, out of which fund the sum of
ten thousand dollars was set apart for the endow
ment of The John Bohlen Lectureship, upon
the following terms and conditions : —
The money shall be invested in good substantial and
safe securities, and held in trust for a fund to be called
The John Bohlen Lectureship, and the income shall be
applied annually to the payment of a qualified person,
whether clergyman or layman, for the delivery and pub
lication of at least one hundred copies of two or more
lecture sermons. These Lectures shall be delivered at
such time and place, in the city of Philadelphia, as the
persons nominated to appoint the lecturer shall from

viii THE JOHN BOHLEN LECTURESHIP
time to time determine, giving at least six months notice
to the person appointed to deliver the same, when the
same may conveniently be done, and in no case select
ing the same person as lecturer a second time within a
period of five years. The payment shall be made to
said lecturer, after the lectures have been printed and
received by the trustees, of all the income for the year
derived from said fund, after defraying the expense of
printing the lectures and the other incidental expenses
attending the same.
The subject of such lectures shall be such as is within
the terms set forth in the will of the Rev. John Bampton,
for the delivery of what are known as the "Bampton
Lectures," at Oxford, or any other subject distinctively
connected with or relating to the Christian Religion.
The lecturer shall be appointed annually in the month
of May, or as soon thereafter as can conveniently be done,
by the persons who, for the time being, shall hold the
offices of Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church of
the Diocese in which is the Church of the Holy Trinity ;
the Rector of said Church; the Professor of Biblical
Learning, the Professor of Systematic Divinity, and the
Professor of Ecclesiastical History, in the Divinity School
of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Philadelphia.
In case either of said offices are vacant the others
may nominate the lecturer.
Under this trust the Reverend ARTHUR ROGERS,
Rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity, West
Chester, Pennsylvania, was appointed to deliver
the lectures for the year 1909.

PREFACE
y4 BOOK is like a sentence in that, to be
/ % complete, it must needs have both a
jL. J^ subject and an object. I do not mean
the sort of object which has to do with the public,
whether it be to improve its morals or to induce it
to buy the volume. But the author must have in
mind the kind of people whom he would like to
read his book, and the effect that he would like it
to produce. The subject of this volume is suffi
ciently indicated by the title. It is a comparison
between two great men, each of them a leader in
his generation, and one of them at any rate an out
standing figure in the history of the world's thought.
A word as to its object may not be amiss. Isaiah
suggests sermons, but there are no sermons here.
Browning suggests essays, but this is no book of
essays. I have meant to set my heroes side by side,
to point out where there is a likeness, and then to
prove the likeness, not by my own words, but by
theirs. Selection and proportion, therefore, have

X PREFACE
played a large part in my work. There are persons,
good citizens and doers of the moral law, who find
Isaiah dull and Browning unintelligible. If this
book, through some inadvertence or the gift of ill-
judged friends, shoidd fall into the hands of any
such, they will presently cast it from them as the
abomination of desolation. They will be right. It
was never meant for them. But I am not without
hope that there may be some who have known and
loved Isaiah, while they have not laiown much
about Browning, and some others, who have known
and loved Browning, while they have thought of
Isaiah as inspired but without much human in
terest, whom my book may lead to want to know
the other better. It is those who have cared much
for both who will know best whether I have done
my work well or ill.
A. R.
West Chester, Pennsylvania
January, 1909

CONTENTS
Chapter I. The Common Ground of Poetry and
Religion 
II. Isaiah among the Prophets
III. Browning among the Poets
IV. Isaiah and Browning. . .
V. The Use of Assyria . . .
VI. The Remnant Shall Return
VII. The Meaning of the Future
VIII. The Force of Personality .
IX. The Besetting God . . .

Page I
2752
95
117 149176206239

PROPHECY AND POETRY
CHAPTER I
THE COMMON GROUND OF POETRY
AND RELIGION
RELIGION and Poetry are two most potent
and far-reaching words. Without religion,
though God would still be God, He would be ban
ished from men's thought of Him, and the earth,
in other than a physical sense, would be, as at
its first beginning, without form and void. Without
poetry, there would be a closing of vistas, a darkening
of the heavens, a general shutting up within the limits
of the material and the commonplace. The wise
man of old declared that where there is no vision the
people perish. If we think of humanity as one great
body, the poets are, as it were, the eyes. If they were
lacking, the blackness of thick darkness would settle
down over a large part of life.
Neither Poetry nor Religion lend themselves easily
to formal definition. There are times, of course,

2 PROPHECY AND POETRY
when definition is most necessary, but there are other
times when it is quite as likely to do harm as good.
It is apt to leave out what should have been included,
and to include, and so to become responsible for,
what might as well have been left out. After all,
definition is only another word for limitation, and
now and then we like to feel that there are no walls to
shut us in, no fences to bar om: progress and hinder
us from wandering freely at our own sweet will. We
learned in school the algebraic formula for the square
of a plus h. There is no doubt about it. It is a fact
imdeniable and incontrovertible. We can explain it
and understand it, and when it has been stated the
last word upon the subject has been said. But
sometimes it is good for us to have to do with what
we can neither altogether explain nor altogether
understand. It is impossible to describe the manner
in which men choose their friends. It does not by
any means follow that they are the brightest or the
best amongst our circle of acquaintance. Sometimes
they are, sometimes they are not; it seems to be a
matter of indifference. It is a most shabby-genteel
kind of friendship which depends in any way upon
benefits received. These may follow as an effect,

THE COMMON GROUND 3
but they are quite inadequate as an exciting cause.
Again, there are times when our friends do things
which we dislike, or even disapprove. But somehow
or other they enter into our lives, and give to us in
measure which no outsider could possibly understand.
There is no such complete finish to the whole matter
as in the case of the algebraic formula. But if it
comes to a comparison between algebra and friend
ship, there are few who would not feel that friendship
covers a more interesting and attractive part of life.
AU this is true when we come to speak of Poetry or
Rehgion. It is not hard to find things to say about
them. But it is quite impossible to say the last word
about either of them, to do them up in some neat
parcel which the casual customer may take away.
They are too large for any such easy treatment. They
mean so much that one shrinks from trying even to
suggest their meaning, lest he should put it illy and
awry. They carry us into deep waters where there
are no soundings. We are in danger of weakening
our citadel with superfluous and useless battle
ments, which give so many added vantage-points to
any prowling enemy. However much may be said
about either of them, and however truly it may

4 PROPHECY AND POETRY
be spoken, we know that the half has not been
told. Religion is man's going out to God. It is his com
mg to himself among the husks of matter, and claim
ing for his own the Father from whose home he came.
It calls upon him to lift his eyes to heaven. As we
have it in the form of Christianity, it brings heaven
down to earth. It is the expression and aclmowledg-
ment of our relationship to God. We are His people,
and the sheep of His pasture. Poetry, on the other
hand, is man's highest thought about himself — the
world he lives in, the problems which he has to face.
It is inevitable that such thought should not, sooner
or later, lead to God ; but in poetry God is not, as in
religion, the professed goal. As Principal Shairp puts
it — " To appeal to the higher side of human nature,
and to strengthen it ; to come to its rescue when it is
overborne by worldliness and material interests; to
support it by great truths, set forth in their most
attractive form — this is the only worthy aim, the
adequate end, of aU poetic endeavor." Religion
deals with the will. Poetry quickens the emotions.
Religion sets forth duties. It is Poetry's business to
fill those duties with enthusiasm. The prophet

THE COMMON GROUND 5
speaks to man for God. The poet, at his highest,
speaks to God for men. He is not different from his
brethren, but he is man in the superlative degree.
Poetry is like one of Chopin's Nocturnes, seeking,
aspiring, hoping, yet not without a suggestion that
that which is sought has not yet been found. Can
man by searching find out God? The old question
which comes to us from the very dawn of history has
gained no new answer from the centuries that have
passed over it. Then Religion comes to the rescue.
It may be compared to that glorious Sanctus of
Gounod, where nothing is sought because there is
no need of seeking, but which lifts us from adoration
to the rest that remaineth for the people of God, and
to that peace of God which cannot be explained,
because it passeth understanding, but which can be
realized, as many a struggling soul has learned
through blessed experience. If Poetry is the expres
sion of man's highest thought. Religion is at once the
acknowledgment and the satisfaction of his deepest
need. In any study of Religion, there are two words
which will be constantly recmrring. They are faith
and love. When the ancient prophet Habakkuk

6 PROPHECY AND POETRY
declared that the just should live by his faith, he
was stating no new doctrine. It was the very prin
ciple of hfe. Faith of some sort is of the very air we
breathe. St. Paul took the saying, and put it at the
foundation of his teaching. We are told that without
faith it is impossible to please God. Its triumphs
are recounted in that chapter of the Epistle to the
Hebrews which stands as a sort of roll of honor of
the ancient world. To be able to see what is in
visible, to make one's own what is as yet unseen,
is the surest guarantee of endmrance. And we see
faith's power, when we find Christ saying to the
woman who came to Him for help — " Thy faith
hath saved thee; go in peace."
But while faith is so powerful, it must yield the
chief place to love. There might be such a thing as
loveless faith. We are told that the devils also
believe, and tremble. But while there may be
imfaithfulness, it would be hard to imagine such a
thing as faithless love, a love which did not trust its
object. The same St. Paul who preached of faith
with such enthusiasm compares it directly with love
to its exceeding disadvantage. Though I have all
faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have

THE COMMON GROUND 7
not love, I am nothing. Love includes faith.
It is a mere incident that it believes aU things.
The two great commandments of the law which
Christ reiterated for His disciples were that they
should love the Lord their God with heart and soul
and mind and strength, and that they should love
their neighbor as themselves. St. John declares that
those who have learned love's meaning have passed
from death to life; and when he seeks to describe
God in words he can find no better definition than
to say that God is love.
These words, which figure so prominently in
anything that can be called religion, are not without
their counterparts in poetry. What we have been
thinking of as faith now becomes imagination. Not,
indeed, that faith and imagination are the same,
outside the garish realms of those strange sects
which measure the depths of human credulity and
folly. But they are alike in this, — that each has the
power of grasping the unseen, of lengthening the
cords of the mind, of passing from the material to
the spiritual. And that love, which in religion
shows itself in active ways, appears in poetry in
that human interest which makes us at home in

8 PROPHECY AND POETRY
every period of history and under every heaven,
that touch of nature which makes the whole world kin.
To Poetry and Religion, thought of in this way,
there belongs a very large common ground. Each
has its own sphere, but now and again the time comes
when they cannot be kept apart. It is impossible
to live in the world, stiU less to look out upon it with
any interest in what Tennyson calls "the riddle of
the painful earth," and not to be impressed by the
problem of human suffering which meets us at
every turn. There is no escaping from it. Now
and then, like the priest and the Levite, we can put
it off for a little by crossing the road and looking
the other way. But the time wiU come when we
must carry it with us whatever road we take; and
when, if we close our eyes to it, it will find other means
of making its presence felt. There are coimtless
ways by which we may be afflicted and distressed, in
mind, body, and estate. "Why art thou so heavy,
O my soul, and why art thou so disquieted within
me?" It is a common enough question. Someone
has said that if pessimism be true, it differs from
other truths by its uselessness. But in a spirit quite
different from that of the pessimist, we may almost

THE COMMON GROUND 9
say that this sad question belongs to universal
humanity itself. There are the many ills which flesh
is heir to. The changes and chances of this mortal
life press heavily upon men. It grieves us that here
we have no continuing city. We cannot sing the
Lord's song in a strange land. We are appalled at
the absurdities of human judgment. Milton received
five pounds for " Paradise Lost," while some spoiler
of paper, whose wares are sold with thread and rail
way tickets, earns preposterous sums by the pen,
more bloodthirsty than any sword, with which he
murders literature. Whether suffering be physical
or mental, whether it come from misunderstanding
or lack of appreciation or some quite different cause,
of course the Psalmist's answer to his question is the
only one. "O put thy trust in God." But Poetry
adds corroborative witness. By her contempt for
worldliness and crass materialism, by her eager state
ment of the problem, by her gentle sympathy, as in
those words of Virgil,
"Tears tliere are for human things,
And hearts are touched by mortal sufferings,"
she stands, time and again, as a minister of comfort
It is her own work, while it is Religion's too.

10 PROPHECY AND POETRY
Another region in which Poetry becomes the hand
maid of Rehgion is where it broadens men's horizon,
and bids them "look abroad, and see to what fair
countries they are bound." If he is hmited simply to
his own experience, the most traveled man is des
perately provincial, after all. The man who cannot
picture to himself what he has not directly before
his eyes is bound to be, not only a heretic, but a
bore. He is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils,
or for whatever may chance to come his way. He is
a roaring lion in the house, and a biting serpent in the
path. He canonizes prejudice, and deifies inteUectual
sluggishness. Against this half-life, a dead mind in
an ungoverned body, Poetry lifts a warning voice.
It caUs upon men to think, and to think of something
besides their own rights, and their neighbors' errors.
If Euodias and Syntyche cannot agree about their
own affairs, Poetry gives them a common meeting--
place outside themselves. It goes far towards taking
away from men their right to complain of loneliness
and isolation. There is nothing that can quite take
the place of human companionship. We need
our friends. We need the encouragement and appre
ciation of our kind. It is good to feel the pressure

THE COMMON GROUND ii
of a friendly shoulder as we march through Ufe.
But, given half a chance, it is a man's own fault if
he does not see beyond the end of the village street.
The things that are not seen, immediately, are the
eternal things; and Poetry, as it quickens and
broadens the mind, gives us power to grasp these
things. It is not what we are in the habit of caUing
Revelation. As Ewald defines it, Revelation, in its
narrower sense, is a spiritual incident in human
history which is now closed. It is not Religion.
That requires, not only that a man should see the
heavenly vision, but that he should not be disobedient
to it. But, without Poetry, ReUgion would lose one of
its most efficient aids.
Not only does Poetry broaden the horizon.. It has
an upward, as weU as an outward look. It comes to
men with a message of good cheer. It bids them stir
up the gift that is in them, and be not afraid to take
their places in the world. To inspire and encourage
is its business. The poet is feUow-laborer with the
prophet. The prophet speaks out what God has
given him to say. He cannot be sUent if he would,
just as the true poet "does but sing because he must."
He is a man of the spirit, taken possession of by a

12 PROPHECY AND POETRY
power higher than himself. He is a watchman, set
to look out over the world, and to see where help is
needed. He is a seer, with eyes sharp beyond those
of other men. And the poet is these things too.
When Poetry helps men to bear their burdens, and
points them to a higher Ufe, it is doing the very work
of God.
In this connection we may take one step farther.
Poetry enlarges life, and quickens it, and lifts it to a
higher plane. But it does even more than this. It
looks beyond Ufe, and tries to cast Ught upon the
problem which vexed Job of old — "If a man die,
shaU he live again?" It would pierce the darkness
which, imtil Christ's resurrection, was aU but im
penetrable. It is very different, of course, from
dogmatic theology. The one seeks after truth. The
other has truth, or thinks it has it, and aims to set it
forth in orderly form. Where things are too definite.
Poetry has no place, for Uke the Spirit of God we
cannot teU whence it comes nor whither it goes.
Any attempt to make Poetry the vehicle of dogmatism
must always fail, as many popular hymns cry aloud
to heaven. Those are regions where Poetry comes as
an intruder, and where it is very likely, if it insists on

THE COMMON GROUND 13
forcing an entrance, to play the fool. But where it
inquires, and seeks, and hopes, though it concerns
itself with the very deepest problems, it is never out
of place.
St. Vincent of Lerins, searching for a standard by
which Catholic faith might be determined, declared
that that should be so regarded which had been
believed always, everywhere, and by all. It was not
a standard favorable to the formation of elaborate
Articles of Faith. But in the way in which we have
been thinking of Poetry, we need not fear to submit
it even to so severe a test. For the Poetry of every
period and every nation has taken on, somewhere or
other, this religious guise. We are told that the
inscription on the cross of Christ was written in
Hebrew, and Greek, and Latin, so that aU who spoke
those languages might be able to read it in their
common speech. And surely, in each one of them,
there was that which was making ready for Chris
tianity, long before our Lord Himself appeared upon
the earth. At sundry times and in divers manners
God spake, not only by the prophets, but through
the poets. They were religious, even though they
could not be Christian. Their views of life have

14 PROPHECY AND POETRY
played an important part in shaping the thought of
later times.
Any mention of Greek poetry which should leave
out Homer would be absurd. It is true, the reUgious
element in Homer is rare, but if we give to the word
religion its fuU sweep it is by no means lacking. It is
the Christian teaching that he who loves God wiU
love his brother also. Conversely, he who can forget
himself for his friend's sake, whatever may be his
failings, is on the highroad that leads to the kingdom
of God. AchiUes was very far from being a pattern
of the Christian virtues. But in his devotion to his
friend Patroclus the man who could be so fierce and
cruel becomes as a little child. Among the opposing
hosts of Troy there is a Uke instance of that devotion
which lifts men heavenward, together with an eleva
tion of duty above all else which fits in weU with the
heroic stature of the poem. Hector returns to the
city, and there he finds his wife and little son. He
is reminded of aU that they are to him, of aU that his
life and safety must mean to them. He recognizes
the force of Andromache's counsels of prudence,
the claim upon him of her affection and her help
lessness. He grieves at what may happen. He is

THE COMMON GROUND 15
not bUnd to the cruel chance of war. But he must
go. This devotion of friend to friend, of husband
to wife, of patriot to fatherland, can hardly be
caUed reUgion, but it is certainly reUgious in a
very real sense, if we are to accept St. John's
saying that every one that loveth is born of God,
and knoweth God. We shaU search in vain in
Homer for a discussion of those problems of Ufe
which took such deep hold upon the thought of later
Greece. But we must remember that Homer be
longs to the very dawn of history, to the beginnings
of civilization. He is, as it were, a child setting
forth the childhood of the race, and in such matters
it is as a child that he speaks and thinks and under
stands. It would be unnatural if it were otherwise.
Homer as a philosopher or a theologian would be an
enormity. To say that Homer's religion is implicit
rather than explicit, that he does not concern him
self with reUgious problems, is simply to acquit him
of forced precociousness. He reflects the spirit of
the time in which he lived. The time for deeper
thought had not yet come.
When we pass on from Homer to what may be
caUed the Golden Age of the Greek drama, we find

i6 PROPHECY AND POETRY
ourselves in quite another atmosphere. There is
StiU fighting. .iEschylus was at Marathon, and
Sophocles was a general in the Athenian war with
Samos. But life has become less simple than in
earUer days. It is not aU action and the noise of war.
Men have come to feel that it means something,
and they are wondering and wondering what it is.
"A profoimd sense of the Divine government of the
world, of a righteous power punishing pride and vice,
pursuing the children of the guilty to the tenth
generation, but showing mercy to the contrite — in
short, a mysterious and almost Jewish ideal of
offended holiness — pervades the whole work of the
tragedians." These are the words of John Adding-
ton Symonds, than whom no one has done more to
make the Greek poets known to English readers.
And so we find the idea of Nemesis, the sense of
retribution, the certainty that what a man sows
that shaU he also reap, appearing everywhere. With
.^schylus it is a mysterious and awful law, imposed
from without, and in itself of more importance than
the men controUed by it. With Sophocles the human
side is made more prominent. .^Eschylus is the
judge, intent upon the triumph of right principle;

THE COMMON GROUND 17
but Sophocles is the pastor, who cares for men.
He is concerned not so much with the law as with
the lawbreaker, not so much with the sin itseU as
with the sinner. With each, the conduct of human
affairs is referred to a higher power. But ^schylus
lays the emphasis upon the gods who direct, while
Sophocles rather lays it upon the men who perform
or who faU short. If ^Eschylus is the theologian,
Sophocles is the interpreter of human passions, the
apologist for human weakness. The wrath of God
is no less real to him than to his predecessor, but it
is less inflexible. We are made to feel the mysteri-
ousness of existence.
"Many the forms of life
Wondrous and strange to see;
But nought than man appears
More wondrous and more strange."
Where there has been sin there must be suffering,
often vicarious suffering. But sufferings may serve
as lessons. The spirit of man may rise superior to
the misfortunes which are Ukely to oyertake man.
No external curse, even though it should come down
from heaven, can take away real purity of heart and
genuine nobleness of soul. Sophocles is said to have

i8 PROPHECY AND POETRY
written no less than one hundred and thirteen plays,
of which only seven remain to us. It seems a pity
that the others could not have been ransomed from
obUvion in exchange for a few hundred thousand
works which stiU survive. But in the seven plays
which are left, Sophocles shows marveUous insight
into human life. He paints it sad — he is always the
tragedian. But we are taught that the noble things in
it are the things by which it is to be esteemed.
Turning from Greece to Rome, we find that law,
rather than religion or spectdative thought, was the
genius of the Roman people. When Lucretius
devoted himself to the composition of a poem which
was ostensibly religious, its atmosphere was legal
rather than theological. But Virgil, at any rate, is
by no means without claim to be regarded as a
religious poet. The Christian Fathers held him in
special honor. St. Augustine caUed him the finest
and noblest of poets. St. Jerome, who looked
severely on aU heathen writers, thought it unseemly
that priests shoi:dd read him, but aUowed that he was
a necessity for boys. His verses are foimd in the
burial-places of the Catacombs, associated with the
cross and other Christian symbols. There is an old

THE COMMON GROUND 19
legend that St. Paul, on his way to Rome, turned
aside to visit Virgil's tomb near Naples. As we have
it in the sonorous mediaeval Latin —
"Ad Maronis mausoleum
Ductus, fudit super eum
Piae rorem lacrjraiae;
Quem te, inquit, reddidissem,
Si te vivum invenissem,
Poetarum maxime ! "
It may be roughly translated thus —
"To the tomb of Virgil coming,
All his excellences summing.
Wept the apostle, holy Paul.
O, if I could but have known thee,
What the things I would have shown thee,
Greatest poet of them all ! "
Virgil's religion is impUed rather than expressed, to
be found more in the whole spirit of his writing than
in any form of words. In an age of unbeUef and
luxvury and license he stiU reverences the ancient gods
and sings the praises of simpUcity. It is sometimes
said that the vulgar splendor and garish magnifi
cence of which our own age is not without examples
had its prototype in the Rome of Virgil's day. He

20 PROPHECY AND POETRY
was no rude democrat, assaiUng rich men because
they happened to be rich, and pouring scorn on
everything which did not meet his taste. But there
is a healthiness about him which compares most
favorably with the ideals of the time in which he
lived. He is the poet of the country. In the .iEneid,
we have the figure of a man of destiny. .iEneas has
often been compared, to his disadvantage, with the
Homeric heroes. It could not be otherwise. He is
less truculent than Achilles, and if truculency be
made the standard he must take the second place.
But he is a warrior only by accident, or at least as an
Wicident in his career. He fights, and he fights
admirably, but he fights not for the pleasure of it,
but because it is necessary to gain his end. He is the
bearer of the Trojan gods to Italy. He is the " pious
.^neas" always. In our day, the word pious has
come to have a narrower significance, a little technical,
and sometimes with a suggestion not quite agreeable.
But as Virgil uses it, it means the man who does his
duty. It includes all human affections ; love for the
old father whom he carried on his shoulders; for
the boy whom he sought to teach the meaning of
virtue and genuine toil, leaving him to learn from

THE COMMON GROUND 21:
others the meaning of success; patriotism, and
fidelity to the dead. He has to found a kingdom for
his son, to establish a glorious future for his race.
His treatment of Dido stands out, of course, as a
blot upon his character. But when we think of him
as one who was not his own, but who had been set
apart by heaven for its especial work, we have an
explanation of his conduct, even though it be no
excuse. In other than the Pauline sense, but stiU in
a sense that cannot be ignored nor brushed away, he
is the servant of God.
We have found religion, and such reUgion as could
reach its fulfilment in Christianity, among those of
whom we are wont to think as heathen. When now
we come to Hebrew poetry, it is aU reUgious. Indeed,
we are so apt to think of it upon its moral and didactic
side that we sometimes forget that it is poetry. In
the Book of Job we have the problem of suffering
and its relation to God discussed from every point
of view. If we seek for an example of the strength
of friendship, we have it in David's lament for
Jonathan. "I am distressed for thee, my brother
Jonathan; very pleasant hast thou been unto me;
thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of

22 PROPHECY AND POETRY
women." The same David shows the intensity of a
father's love, even though it be but iU-deserved. It
is history, but it is poetry too. The king was much
moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate,
and wept; and as he went, thus he said, " O my son
Absalom, my son, my son Absalom ! Would God I
had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son ! "
It is the exceeding bitter cry that has gone up to
heaven, from one generation to another, from those
who have been wounded in their tenderest part in
that they have been caUed upon to bear the in
gratitude, and to mourn the disgrace, of the children
of many hopes and prayers. As for the Psalms, they
have been the treasure-house of devotion in every
age. From the prophets we have the voice of God to
man, but here we have man calling upon God. They
give us the spiritual history of the times in which they
were composed. They put into words for us those
most secret feelings, which, speaking for ourselves, we
should neither be able nor wiUing to express. They
touch the very depths of human suffering. Never
had the miscarriage of friendship a more tender
elegy than from him who was betrayed by one with
whom he had taken sweet counsel, and walked in

THE COMMON GROUND 23
trust and confidence in the house of God. They
show us the patriot in exile, the man of high ideals
and tender conscience who has lost his self-respect.
But they go also to the other extreme, and give us
examples of faith and joy and confidence for which in
any such degree we should look elsewhere in vain.
To exhaust the religious element in Hebrew poetry
would be to quote the entire Psalter, and then to add
whatever poetry stiU remained. Of a very different
spirit from that which is commonly brought before
us in the Psalms, though even there there are most
notable examples of it, is Deborah's song of victory.
It would be impossible in the New Testament, but
it is none the less magnificent. It is totaUy lacking
in the Christian virtues, but it is tremendous in its
fervid intensity — religious, because in God's cause,
and in no personal and selfish matter. " They fought
from heaven; the stars in their courses fought
against Sisera. She put her hand to the nail, and her
right hand to the workman's hammer; and with the
hammer she smote Sisera, she smote off his head,
when she had pierced and stricken through his
temples. At her feet he bowed, he feU, he lay down;
at her feet he bowed, he feU; where he bowed, there

24 PROPHECY AND POETRY
he feU down dead." At home they waited for him.
They gloated over triumphs that should never come
to pass. "The mother of Sisera looked out at a
window, and cried through the lattice, ' Why is his
chariot so long in coming ? Why tarry the wheels of
his chariot? ' " Her court ladies give an answer that
is very different from the real one. And then, as
with a crash of thimder, Deborah makes an end.
"So let aU Thine enemies perish, O Lord; but let
them that love Him be as the sim when he goeth
forth in his might."
Between the ancient and the modern world, there
is a great guU fixed. Old things passed away, and all
things became new. With the old civilizations, the
old literatures came to an end. Men stiU thought,
of course, and wrote down what they thought. But
their thoughts were turned into other channels. In
the sixth century Justinian codified the Roman Law.
The writings of the Christian Fathers were no doubt
religious, but by no stretch of imagination could they
be caUed poetry. There was a long transition period,
when there were fightings without and fears within,
when the world, shaken out of its old ruts, was trying
to find itself again, when men's hands were busy but

THE COMMON GROUND J15
their brains were dull. There were many who
were concerned about their souls, but more and more
the wilderness and the monastery came to offer a
short and easy method of escape. For more ad
venturous dispositions the Crusades offered an
oudet for superfluous energy, and combined romance
and religion in a way which could not but be popular.
It is not until the thirteenth century that another
great poet appears. Though there was dearth of
religious thought during the Middle Ages, and
especially of religious imagination, there was no lack
of reUgious action, or of a religious background for
ideas. We may question if the Church went very
deep, in spite of the great Cathedrals which were
the product of that time. It is not likely that it
touched the springs of human conduct as closely as
in happier periods. But that its influence was wide
spread there can be no doubt. And when at last,
after aU those centuries of waiting, the great poet
came who is the link between the remote past and
modern days, he paints his pictures and thinks his
thought against the background of his own time.
Dante is reUgious through and through. In every
Une of the "Divine Comedy" God is immanent.

26 PROPHECY AND POETRY
There is no getting away from Him. His judgments
are the subject of the poem. And with aU that is
fierce in it, and terrible, its motive power is love. It
is Uttle enough that we know of Beatrice ; but in the
"Vita Nuova" Dante writes that he hopes to say of
her that which has never been said of any woman.
The "Divine Comedy" was the result.
We have traversed many lands and many cen
turies. We have found no great poetry from which
some element of religion was absent, nor could we
find it anywhere. There are, of course, regions of
the religious Ufe in which poetry has no place, but
wherever there is Poetry of the highest type ReUgion
cannot be very far away.

CHAPTER n
ISAIAH AMONG THE PROPHETS
THERE are many voices which clamor to be
heard. Words of one sort and another
force themselves upon men, and demand attention
for themselves, jumbled together in a strange
medley of discord and confusion, of impudence
and reverence, of hopelessness and appeal. There
is a countless multitude of ever-changing ques
tions which make up for us the mystery and the
tragedy and the responsibility of life. There are the
world-old problems of sickness and pain, of doubt
and wretchedness and affliction, of sin and punish
ment, solution for which must stiU be sought, though
centuries of seeking have not availed to find an
answer. How shaU we take our places in a world
that it is so hard to understand, and amid the varying
standards what is to be the measure of our manhood ?
What makes success, and what makes failure?
Where each one can do so little, what shaU we select

28 PROPHECY AND POETRY
to do? So they crowd on one another, despairing,
passionate, indifferent even; eager, hopeful, pitiful;
the thousand questions that have to do with life.
There are many answers for them, some of them
misleading and grotesque enough; but above the
tumult of uncertain cries there rises a louder and
more commanding voice. Here is one who speaks
with authority, for it is the word of the Lord which he
proclaims. He is a prophet, a messenger, a preacher
of righteousness, an interpreter of the ways of God to
men. Such men have lived in every age. But the
Hebrew prophets whose writings are contained in
the Old Testament possessed in highest develop
ment aU the characteristics of their class.
The earlier prophets, men like Samuel and EUjah,
stand out distinctly from the record of their time.
We know what they did, but not very much of what
they said. They were men of affairs, not men of
letters. The figures of the later prophets are much
more shadowy and dim. They have their word to
say, and they say it; but for themselves they are
content to remain in the shadow which the heavenly
brightness of their message casts. But now and
again that message reveals them, and distinguishes

ISAIAH AMONG THE PROPHETS 29
them from one another as weU as from the outside
world. In the early years of King Uzziah's reign, when the
kingdoms of Judah and Israel were stiU prosperous
and "at ease," the word of the Lord came to Amos,
who was among the herdmen of Tekoa. He is the
first of those whom we may caU the literary prophets.
Unlike most of his feUows, he is no special type of
man. Rather, he seems to stand out from the pages
of the Old Testament, "a colossal figure of generic
manhood." He is the possession, not of any class or
disposition, but of the race. He comes to the king's
court at Bethel, at festival time. Though his Uttle
book is not destitute of visions, it is as an apostle of
facts that he chiefly speaks. Do not results foUow
upon certain causes? If two are seen walking to
gether in the desert, must it not be that they had
appointed to meet? WiU a lion roar in the forest,
when he hath no prey? WiU a young lion cry out
of his den, if he have taken nothing? WiU the
prophet speak, unless the Lord hath commanded
him? Nay, does one need to be a prophet, in the
usual sense of the word, to hear the word of the
Lord? His discourse is interrupted. He has told

30 PROPHECY AND POETRY
unpalatable truths. He has violated the convention
alities of religion. He is a visionary. Amaziah, the
priest of Bethel, makes himself spokesman for the
rest. " O thou seer, go, flee thee away into the land of
Judah, and there eat bread, and prophecy there ; but
prophecy not any more at Bethel ; for it is the king's
chapel, and it is the king's court." Does Amaziah,
then, judging others by himself, suppose that these
are mere professional utterances which Amos has
been speaking? There is nothing professional
about him. "I was no prophet, neither was I a
prophet's son ; but I was an herdman, and a gatherer
of sycomore fruit; and the Lord took me as I
foUowed the flock, and the Lord said unto me, Go,
prophecy unto my people Israel." So Amos left his
flock, and came to Bethel, and said what he had to
say. Then he disappears. It was not for him, as for
Isaiah or Jeremiah, to watch over the fortunes of the
state for many years. When he has done his work,
there is no more to be said of him. It is most likely
that he went back to the lonely deserts of Tekoa, and
found his sheep again, and took up the thread of his
interrupted Ufe. He thought of "Him that maketh
the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of

ISAIAH AMONG THE PROPHETS 31
death into the morning, and maketh the day dark
with night," while far away, across the wilderness,
the Ughts of Jerusalem reminded him that he was not
the sole inhabitant of the world.
"The Lord took me as I foUowed the flock." If
there are many ways in which God speaks to men,
Amos would teU us that there is no man to whom He
may not speak. We shut God up within conditions,
we limit Him to times and places, we make such
words as spiritual and secular stand not for com
plementary but for opposing spheres of life. Samuel
may hear God's voice, for he grows up within the
precincts of the temple. To Isaiah and his brethren
there comes a special call, a moment of extra
ordinary consecration, the power to apprehend the
sights and sounds of another and higher world.
Amos lacks all this. He is no prophet, nor prophet's
son. His only school has been the desert. His com
panions have been his sheep, and the wild beasts of
which he so often speaks. His books are the bright
Eastern stars, the winds that blow strong across the
pasture, the caravans which come and go. There is
nothing technicaUy reUgious in such a life; but
technical reUgion is religion in its very lowest form.

32 PROPHECY AND POETRY
There are certain definite things that should be done
for God, but religion means not so much the doing of
certain things as the doing of aU things in a certain
way. It is not a beautiful garment to be worn on holy
days ; it is the very breath of life. And Amos stands
for just the preparation that common Ufe may bring
to hear God's word. To put it in another form, he
teaches the reUgious responsibility and power of lay
people. He is no prophet; but he is commanded to
speak for God. He is no prophet's son; but he
hears the voice of God. He is a dweUer in the desert ;
but God is there. His task is of the humblest and
most prosaic kind; but God took him as he went
about it, and bade him do His work. There have
been times and places when it was the custom to
identify the Church with the clergy. Beginning
perhaps with a tendency on their part to claim its
privileges, it developed into what seemed at times
Uke a tendency on the part of the laity to leave them
to perform its duties. But the difference of orders
in the Church is a difference not of dignity nor even
of responsibility, but of service. God does not reach
aU men by the same methods, nor does He expect all
men to do the same work for Him. But He can

ISAIAH AMONG THE PROPHETS 33
speak to Amos in the desert, no less than to Samuel
in the temple or to David on the throne.
The logical order is not always the chronological
one. The Book of Zechariah belongs to the later
period of Hebrew prophecy, but that idea of personal
responsibility which we have seen in Amos is stiU
here. It is a confused book, and a confusing. At
one moment, we have a picture of security and con
fidence which could not be painted in more glowing
colors. There is no cutting-off in the very prime of
life. Men fiU out their appointed time, and die only
because they are worn out, and have no longer
strength to live. The children need no watching,
for there is no harm that could come to them. It is
a time when the very weakest and most helpless are
secure. And then, in another moment, we have the
clash of weapons and the tramp of marching men.
But it is not only this abrupt change of subject
which makes Zechariah's book confusing. In every
part of it there is a use of metaphor and imagery
which puzzles and bewilders. The prophet gives
free rein to his imagination. He speaks in parables,
and teaches by pictures which may have been ob
vious enough when they were drawn, but which have
3

34 PROPHECY AND POETRY
not gained in clearness by the lapse of centuries.
There is a man who rides on a red horse among the
myrtle-trees. There is a man with a measuring Une.
There are candlesticks, and lamps, and olive-trees.
There are chariots and crowns. We may take one
of these pictures from the rest, because it seems to
characterize the prophet's thought.
He looks about him, and he sees people who are in
need of help. They want leadership and guidance.
There are many paths, and they do not know which
path to take. There are many counseUors, and they
do not know to whom to listen. They are hungry for
the word of Ufe, but they are Uke flocks who wander
where the fields are parched and dry. Who can find
pasture for them? The prophet takes the vacant
place. It is a place of honor, but of care and labor.
He wiU give them what they need. He wiU feed them.
To hold them together, to make them responsive
to his caU, he takes two staves. Beauty and Bands,
he calls them. They are the aids by which he hopes
to do his work.
It is true, his undertaking failed. His staves were
cut asunder and cast away. But his faUure was not
the prophet's fault. Without a figure, what he tried

ISAIAH AMONG THE PROPHETS 35
to say seems to be simply this. There are those who
are in trouble and distress, and they have been com
mitted to his care. He wants to help them in their
perplexity, and to lead them to the highest life. How
can he do it ? What can he take to help him ? First
of aU, he wiU point them to what is beautiful, and
show them, what they wiU soon learn for themselves,
how close is the connection between what is beautiful
and what is good. And then, he wiU dweU on the
things that make men to be of one mind in a house,
the things that make for peace. He wiU show that
selfishness means isolation and hideous loneliness,
that God Himself has set the solitary in families, and
made of one blood aU the nations of the earth. What
draws men to one another wiU draw them to God,
unless it be degraded and abused.
Beauty and Bands — neither the one nor the other
is religion, and yet they have their work to do for
God. They are staves in the shepherd's hand,
without which he would be hindered and crippled in
his work. Beauty may be made a means of grace,
an Article of ReUgion, as it were. A beautiful
church bears its witness for God to many who take
no part in what goes on inside. A beautiful service

36 PROPHECY AND POETRY
touches springs of feeling which argument could
never reach. A beautiful poem or picture seems
to make mean things meaner, unlovely things un-
loveUer, and base things baser than they were be
fore. Satisfaction with what is low and degrading
comes usuaUy from ignorance of what is better. If
now an appreciation of what is beautiful can be
awakened, appreciation of what is good may quickly
foUow. And what is true of things is even truer
when it comes to be appUed to people. Goodness
has a power of its own. We honor it, we respect it,
sometimes we love it. But this last not always. It
may be forbidding and severe. There may be some
thing icy in its grasp, and chiUing in its breath.
Though we might not be justified in refusing to call
it goodness, it may take forms which not only do
not attract men to it, but repel. It is the righteous
ness which is of the law, with nothing human in its
voice or touch. But when, in place of goodness, we
have what may be caUed beauty of character, that is
quite different. Things may be lacking which ought
not to be lacking, but it draws men to it, and com
mands them, whether they wiU or no. The word
which our English Bible renders Beauty is trans-

ISAIAH AMONG THE PROPHETS 37
lated "Graciousness" by one of the leading scholars
who has written upon Zechariah. It is the staff
called Graciousness which the shepherd takes to
help him feed his flock. And Graciousness de
scribes as weU as any word that combination of
quaUties which goes to make up beauty of disposi
tion. There is grace, both in the Greek and Hebrew
sense, grace human and divine. There is the knowl
edge of what to do and how to do it, of what to say
and how to say it. There is the power of meeting
men on their own ground, and making them feel at
ease. There is that suppression of one's seU which
is at the opposite pole from the vulgar self-assertion
which may be found in aU classes of society, from
the prize-fighter to the theologian. The prize-fighter
uses his fists as nature gave them to him. The theo
logian, who is oftener only an ecclesiastic, clenches
them about a pen, and dips his pen in gaU. Both
aUke, they lack that Graciousness with which the
shepherd fed his flock. Where Beauty is, Bands
wiU be close by; for where there is Graciousness,
Sympathy cannot be far away.
This personal obligation is no monopoly of the
prophetic office ; it belongs to the nation as a whole.

38 PROPHECY AND POETRY
Jerusalem has been laid desolate, but now the day of
restoration is at hand. It will have consequences ex
tending beyond the people who are most concerned.
"In those days it shaU come to pass, that ten men
shall take hold out of aU languages of the nations,
even shaU take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew,
saying, ' We wiU go with you, for we have heard that
God is with you.' " When they were tried and hum
bled, then they could be alone. They could pass
alone through the valley of the shadow. But at the
time of restoration they could be alone no longer.
Out of all languages of the nations there were found
those to hang upon them, and claim some share
in the triumph that had come to them. Because
God was with them, those who felt their own need
of God must be with them too.
Amos left his sheep that he might speak God's
word. Zechariah took the staves that he might lead
the flock. There is the same sense of Divine com
pulsion in the great prophet Jeremiah. He was by
nature a peaceful, quiet man. He loved his home
at Anathoth. A lodging-place in the wilderness,
where he could have left the city's treachery and
tumult far behind, was aU that he would have asked.

ISAIAH AMONG THE PROPHETS 39
Then the voice of the Lord sounded in his ears. At
first he hesitated. "Then said I, Ah, Lord God,
behold, I cannot speak, for I am a child." He was
timid and sensitive of rebuke, and he knew that there
were no smooth things which he must say. Why
should he be a man of strife and a man of contention
to the whole earth? But his natural shrinking
could not stand against the caU of God. He prophe
sied for fifty dreary years. He was born at a time
when things were weU in the land, and he lived to
see conditions change from good to bad, from bad
to worse, from worse to the very worst which the
imagination could conceive. There were times
when he rebelled against the fate which compeUed
him, with aU his native gentleness, to be forever
speaking harsh words into deaf ears. After he has
been buffeted and punished as a common criminal,
his patience fails him. "I am in derision daily;
every one mocketh me." He tries to find safety in
silence. "Then I said, I wiU not make mention of
Him, nor speak any more in His name." But he
was too genuine a man to be able to escape an un
pleasant duty by running away from it. " His word
was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my

40 PROPHECY AND POETRY
bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could
not stay." Now and then there comes a faint ray of
hope, but always the darkness setdes down again.
Jeremiah is a prophet, and he must look upon the
institution of prophecy as it becomes more and more
degraded. He is a priest, who must see the priest
hood growing more and more corrupt. He is a
citizen whose counsels are jeered at by self-seekers,
and he must look on, helpless, while the city which
he loves is hurried to destruction by knaves and fools.
He puts his warnings into writing, and sends them
to the king; but the king, after three or fom- pages,
flings the manuscript into the fire which is on the
hearth, and watches it as it crumbles into ashes. He
must bear all the sorrows of his people, and he has
sorrows of his own besides. He is thrust into the
stocks. He is thrown into a foul dungeon, where it
was a question whether he should starve or strangle.
From the moment that he set out to do God's work,
his Ufe is one long succession of disappointment,
despondency, and failure.
But it is just here that he surpasses Amos and
Zechariah. They felt the responsibiUty which rested
upon them. Jeremiah feels the responsibiUty which

ISAIAH AMONG THE PROPHETS 41
rests upon God. Since he can do so little, God must
do the more. For himself, he has nothing to glory
in. He never knew the elation which attends suc
cess. He had high ambitions, not for himself, but
for his country, and he saw them fade and disappear.
He was in perpetual conflict with stupid wickedness
which could not even understand his point of view.
His own work was a complete and dismal failure.
But always, back of his failure, back of the shame
less misdeeds of his people, which he can see, but
which he is powerless to prevent, there stands the
vision of the glory and the majesty of God. There
are times when the way in which he identifies him
self with his Divine master suggests the New Testa
ment rather than the Old. Be it as it may be with
his work and its result. But Jeremiah flings himself
on God, and finds in Him the justification for aU
that he has done or failed in doing.
But after aU, we have not yet reached the heights
of prophecy. When Mr. Sargent drew the figures
of the prophets on the waUs of the PubUc Library
in Boston, it was no accident that Isaiah and Hosea
stood out from aU the rest. AU spoke for God, but
these two were separated from their brethren even

42 PROPHECY AND POETRY
as the company of prophets was separated from
mankind at large. In the figure of Isaiah there is a
suggestion of that passion for righteousness, that
power of seeing far into the future, that contempt
for half-way measures, aU of which meet us in every
chapter of his book. In Hosea we have a man of a
different type, perhaps less powerful, but no less
rare and fine. This is a man who has seen affliction,
but, though he teUs his story, he does not call at
tention to himseU. He seeks no pity for his trouble,
he asks no praise for his forbearance. He wraps
himself in the long folds of his white garment, and
looks out on a blackness of thick darkness in which
there is no light but God. With aU his sensitiveness,
with his native yearning for what is true and pure
and good, his lot is cast in the vaUey of the shadow
of moral death. He does not weep, Uke Jeremiah,
for he must watch while Ephraim riots. He is left
alone ; and yet, Uke One who bore his name in later
years, he is not alone, because the Father is with
him. It is in the depth and fulness of Hosea's religious
nature that we may gain our best impression of the
man. He is imder no delusions as to the reality and

ISAIAH AMONG THE PROPHETS 43
ghastliness of sin. It is aU about him. It has wrecked
his home, and made his children outcasts. Our
hearts are made to bleed for poor little Lo-ruhamah,
the child who may not know a father's love. But
while he knows, and knows in his own person, the
hatef ulness of sin, he knows even more surely the ten
derness and long-suffering of God. His faith brings
him even to an understanding of his own misfortunes,
usuaUy the last resting-place of unbelief. The wind
and storm may yet fulfil God's word. In the darkest
passages of his life, with a boldness which startles
and surprises, he sees the working of God's hand.
In the very hideousness of the situation he finds, not
an occasion for cursing God and asking for himself
that he might die, but an opportunity for watchful and
seU-forgetful love. As with Jeremiah, though the
story itself belongs unmistakably to the Old Testa
ment, the spirit of the New Testament is here.
" When he was yet a great way off, his father ran to
meet him." So might it be with the faithless wife
who had left her husband, or with a faithless people
who had wandered from their God. The sin was
great, but love was greater stiU.
In Hosea's dealing with his people, we have the

44 PROPHECY AND POETRY
same chaos of affairs, the same Spirit of God brood
ing over the face of the abyss. The inhabitants of
the Northern Kingdom were fanuliar with every
detail of indecency and dishonor. The yeUowest of
our yeUow journals, though they have their own
methods of making crime distinguished and brutish-
ness interesting, have no more dismal pictures to set
before us than those which we may find in the pages
of Hosea's little book. There is not one line which
would lead us to suppose that his words were ever
heeded or obeyed. But what he might be able to
accomplish lay with God. It was for him to bear his
testimony. And so out of the witch's cauldron which
he was compeUed to stir, f uU of misery and shameful
ignorance and naked vice and overbearing crime,
there comes a message from the loving and forgiving
God. " I wiU heal their backsliding, I wiU love them
freely; for mine anger is turned from them. I wiU
be as the dew unto Israel; he shaU blossom as the
lily, and cast forth his roots as Lebanon. His
branches shall spread, and his beauty shaU be as the
olive-tree, and his smeU as Lebanon."
It is Hosea's knowledge of God, and the intense
ness of his religious disposition, that give significance

ISAIAH AMONG THE PROPHETS 45
to his pictures of the corruption of his time. There
is impurity of every sort, the wildest license and the
freest rein. There is deceit, and fraud, and violence.
There is an impudent playing at religiousness which
apes religion. There is a casting-off of personal
responsibility, a worship of cheap success, a fixed
doctrine that any end justifies any means. AU these
are faults of high antiquity, but their eye is yet un-
dimmed, and their natural strength is unabated stiU.
But with Hosea the thought is not so much that bad
deeds have been done. Rather it is that men have
failed to take their places as the children of God;
but that even sin, with aU its train of hideous con
sequences, cannot destroy God's love.
There were other prophets, of course, some of
them of towering stature, but those whom we have
considered mark the movement of prophecy from
the recognition of individual responsibiUty by Amos
to that trust in the power of God which was Jere
miah's solace, and in the love of God which was
Hosea's only hope. Isaiah was the most conspicu
ous, as he seems to have been the most thoroughly
representative, of them all. He lived in Jerusalem
later than Amos and Hosea, but before Jeremiah

46 PROPHECY AND POETRY
and Zechariah, at a time when prophecy was weU
estabUshed, but before it had begun to show any
marks of weakness or decay. His eternal subject
is the righteousness of God, but the misdeeds of men
were constantly before his eyes. He did not seek
them, but they flung themselves upon him as the
raging waves of the sea assault the coast. Living
where he did and when he did, there were times
when it must have seemed as if the language of
denunciation were his mother-tongue. He paints
Jerusalem in dreary colors. The city, where of aU
the cities in the world justice might be looked for,
was f uU of murderers. Its high officials were " com
panions of thieves." Commercialism was aU but
universal, not only in politics but in every walk of
life. Gain was the highest motive which appealed
to men. The head and the heart bowed down be
fore the pocket. A certain kind of religion was not
unfashionable, but it seems to have been no more
than a fussy formalism. The women shared the
general demoralization. Not only did they fail to
set before the men a higher standard, but they made
bad worse. Their extravagance, their vulgar os
tentation, the flaunting pride with which they tried

ISAIAH AMONG THE PROPHETS 47
to make up for their total lack of self-respect — aU
these the prophet describes with piercing keenness.
They possessed every ornament except the ornament
of a meek and quiet spirit. The city was holy, but
the citizens were corrupt. God was just and right
eous, but those who should have been His subjects
were extortioners and cheats. This was the con
trast which met the prophet's view.
It may be that there were some about him who
wondered why he should speak so sternly of evils for
which he was not responsible, and many of which
were quite beyond his help. He teUs his reasons.
Whether or not they are satisfactory to others, they
wiU at least help to satisfy himseU, and keep his heart
from failing. He looks back over some years of
active work, in which there has been much effort
and but slight accomplishment. He looks forward
to a future uncertain, of course, as the future always
is, but in which there is very Uttle promise of better
times. And then he sets down for all what until now
had been his own possession. In the midst of his
career he goes back to its beginning, and describes
an experience which explains why his Ufe has been
what it is, and why no other Ufe was possible. It

48 PROPHECY AND POETRY
was not self-righteousness which made him the ac
cuser of his brethren. He does not bewail their sins
that he may contrast them with the glitter of his own
virtues. He is no fugitive champion, representing
nothing, entering the lists without equipment, con
tending against he knows not what. His Ufe is one
which he has chosen for himseU, but he is not him
seU his own horizon. " In the year that King Uzziah
died, I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high
and lifted up, and His train fiUed the temple." There
came to the prophet a definite vision at a definite
time. One day he went about his work Uke other
people. The next he was overpowered by such a
realization of the Divine holiness that all other
things were crowded out, and his life was turned
into a new channel. The prophet paints the picture
in the most briUiant colors. The heavenly glory
fiUed the temple. The Lord was high and lifted up,
above the changes and chances of the world. About
the throne were seraphim^ strange heavenly crea
tures, all wings and voice, ready for service and for
praise. They veiled their faces from the radiant
glory. They held themselves back from wandering
hither and thither, that they might be prepared on

ISAIAH AMONG THE PROPHETS 49
the instant to do God's work. But when He spoke,
there were wings with which they might make haste
to do His bidding. They are not silent in their lofty
place. Those who are so close to God cannot but
worship Him. It is only those who are far away
from Him who can be indifferent to His majesty and
power. "Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts."
And others make answer — " The whole earth is fuU of
His glory." Then from the throne itseU there comes a
voice of approval and acceptance, so loud that the
threshold of the door is shaken, and the temple is fiUed
with the smoke of the incense which ascends to God.
This was the prophet's vision. It was the holiness
of God, and not the sinfulness of men, which took
possession of him. Is it strange that his first feeling
was one of terror ? He is a man of unclean lips, and
he dweUs in the midst of a people of unclean lips.
What has he to do with such a vision? What is
there, either in himseU or his surroundings, that it
should be given him to see the King, the Lord of
hosts ? In such a presence, there is need of purifica
tion. And so he teUs us of the seraph who brings
the glowing coal from off the altar, and lays it on his
mouth, that the heavenly flame may burn away all
4

50 PROPHECY AND POETRY
earthly dross. Before he is suffered to speak for God,
he must be made fit to speak. The vision of God's
holiness must be completed by a vision of His abiUty
to fit men for His use. Isaiah has seen God's glory.
Now he hears God's voice. " I heard the voice of the
Lord, saying, Whom shaU I send, and who wiU go
for us?" It is not a command. It is not even a re
quest. If we may say so, it is only a statement of the
Divine need, a confession that God must look to
men to help Him in His work. But this is the very
highest dignity of manhood. The very thought that
God would deign to speak to men at aU seemed
worthy of wonder, in those centuries before the first
Christmas day, when the Son of God was born info
the world and was found in fashion as a man. That
He could need men fiUed life with new glory. And
when Isaiah hears this word, there is not a moment's
hesitation. Whom should God send, but the man
who had seen the heavenly radiance, who had heard the
Divine voice? "Then said I, Here am I, send me."
This is Isaiah's apology for his life. He had to
fight with fools, than which there can be nothing
more trying to men's souls. He had to reason with
those who had no minds. Again and again he cast

ISAIAH AMONG THE PROPHETS 51
his pearls before swine, and gave that which was
holy to the dogs. He was the mock of drunkards,
the scorn of vulgar reveUers. His heavenly visions
were disregarded for crude words of cheap sensation-
mongers. There were times when the highest places
were fiUed by the lowest men. A thousand schemes
must be debated, when the way lay plain. There
was the confusion of incompetency, the unrest which
always attends those whose actions have no con
trolling motive. But Isaiah had his message to de
liver, and he deUvered it. How could he withhold
that which had been committed to him only in trust ?
If there are those who are disposed to find fault with
his vehemence and vigor, it is not his vehemence,
but God's. He has the respect for personal obliga
tion that Amos had, and Zechariah's sense of na
tional responsibility, and Jeremiah's trust in God,
and Hosea's certainty of the redeeming power of
God's love. But more than this, it is that the Lord
has opened the gates of heaven, and taken Isaiah
into His confidence. The prophet whose feet are
planted squarely on the earth is admitted to the
heavenly point of view. From this high vantage-
ground, Isaiah sets out to do his work.

CHAPTER in
BROWNING AMONG THE POETS
JUST as Isaiah can best be understood as one
of a group of Hebrew prophets, so Browning
takes his place among a company of English
poets. One generation succeeds another, and poet
after poet interprets to his contemporaries those
great ideas which form the soul of poetry. Words
worth foUows Milton. Tennyson foUows Spenser.
Browning would not have been what he was if Shake
speare had not gone before him. Not indeed that
any such towering eminence can be claimed for
Browning as for the elder poet. Shakespeare might
have belonged to any country or to any time. When
ever or wherever he might have appeared, it would
have been as an inteUectual miracle, not to be ac
counted for, not to be explained by the common
standards of men's thought. His writings teU us
very little about himseU — the best of them nothing
at aU. But he is concerned with nothing smaller

BROWNING AMONG THE POETS 53
than humanity itself. If there were anyone, any
where, so audacious or so dull of mind as to deny
his power, it might be said of him, as Antigone said
to Creon, that we bear the charge of foUy from a
fool. The judgment would be universal — the
semper, ubique, et ab omnibus of anything that could
pretend to literary criticism.
It is true that Shakespeare has his Umitations,
but that which is perhaps the most obvious and
striking of them all is apparent rather than real.
A student of Uterature has written an essay, — and
a very good essay, too — to which he has given the
title, "The Absence of Religion in Shakespeare."
But we must be catholic in our use of words when
we have to do with such a man. If we give ReUgion
some of those limited and narrow meanings which
sectaries of one sort and another have delighted to
force upon it we might look for it in vain. Shake
speare is no sermon-writer, no controversialist nor
exhorter. He never mounts the pulpit-stairs. He
takes the Church for granted, but he is no defender
of the faith; the Church must fight her own battles
for aU of him. The recognition of the duty that
men owe to God in the mere acknowledgment of

54 PROPHECY AND POETRY
their dependence upon Him is whoUy lacking.
Ferdinand asks Miranda her name, "chiefly that
he may set it in his prayers," but it is Miranda
who is the object of his homage. Gratiano, the
roysterer, describes the correct conduct which he
purposes, in which prayer-books, and sober habits,
and loud amens play a large part. But this is a
cloak — as Polonius puts it, sugaring o'er the devil
himseU with devotion's visage. In portraying the
devotion of a lover to his mistress Shakespeare is
unexceUed, and what he says by Romeo and many
others he gathers up and raises to its highest terms
in those sonnets which contain his only hint at
autobiography. But this is as far as he goes. In
aU his writing, and he shows us many men speak
ing with many mouths, there is not one passage
that could be caUed devotional. Those who are
seeking for an expression of the soul's outpouring
of itself to God must look for it elsewhere.
Again, there is an absence of theology which is
in striking contrast to the great poets of that cen
tury which, for so many years, we caUed our own.
There are certain tenets to which Shakespeare
makes occasional aUusion, and which he seems

BROWNING AMONG THE POETS 55
to take entirely as a matter of course, but that is
aU. Henry IV recognizes the doctrine of the Atone
ment. Maria, in the midst of her laughter at the
unfortunate Malvolio, drops the casual remark that
every Christian means to be saved by believing
rightly. But, while Christianity is often impUcit,
it is nowhere set forth in orderly arrangement. Nor
is this absence of the devotional and the theological
made up for by the ecclesiasticism which some
times essays to take the place of one or both of
these. There are some who ask no questions, if
only the Church be held in sufficient honor. That
is enough. In Shakespeare's plays the Church is
often presented, but the atmosphere of his pages
is not that which Miss Charlotte M. Yonge was
wont to breathe. He shows us bishops, archbishops,
and cardinals, but as we look at them we are re
minded of the little boy who was asked if he had
ever seen a bishop, and who replied that he did
not know ; that he might have seen one, and thought
he was only a common man. Shakespeare's eccle
siastics cannot awaken religious enthusiasm. They
iUustrate the weakness of the clerical character
without its strength. They command the respect

56 PROPHECY AND POETRY
due to their official position, but nothing more.
Sometimes they are weak, sometimes they are
wicked, and if a man were to derive his sole concep
tion of the Church from Shakespeare he would be
justified in holding it in slight regard. Neither
Cardinal Beaufort, with his arrogance, nor Parson
Evans, with his loose companions, could Uft men to
a higher plane of thought and action. And the
Church's defenders do it more harm than good, as
when we find the tipsy Sir Andrew Aguecheek
threatening to beat MalvoUo like a dog because he
is a Puritan.
These are some of the ways in which Religion
is wont to manifest itseU, along which Shakespeare
has not foUowed. But we have not yet exhausted :
Religion's scope. It caUs no doubt for prayer and *
preaching, for creeds and churches, and one who.
should deny this might weU be set down, not only
as unreligious, but as irreligious. But Shakespeare
denies none of these. Rather, he takes them aU
for granted, and then goes about that which is his
chief concern. He has not much to say of the re
lation which man holds to God, but he shows us
in a thousand ways his relation to his neighbor.

BROWNING AMONG THE POETS 57
He does not exhort to the performance of duty, but
he paints conscience at its work as no professional
preacher has ever done. The future life does not
enter very much into the plan of his work, but no
man has depicted the present life with greater
fideUty to truth. It is a mistake to suppose that
the mystic, the ecclesiastic, the theologian, and the
exhorter divide between them aU that could prop
erly be caUed Religion. When St. James attempted
to define it in short compass he passed beyond these
regions. "Pure religion and undefiled before God
and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and
widows in their affliction, and to keep one's self
unspotted from the world." This, of course, is a
personal formula, to regulate one's conduct from
day to day. But it is quite capable of wider adapta
tion, and when we apply it to Uterary work it seems
to be a caU to sympathy and to proportion. "En
large the place of thy tent, and let them stretch
forth the curtains of thine habitations." This was
the cry of the ancient prophet, and it is what our
greatest poet is forever compeUing us to do. He
Ufts the clouds, and broadens our horizon. He
opens our eyes so that we have clear vision where

58 PROPHECY AND POETRY
before we had seen men but as trees walking. He
sets things in their right perspective so far as he
deals with them at all. He takes possession of the
imagination, and makes its desolate cities to be in
habited. We cannot say of him that he is a poet
of the Church, or of the soul, but his field is the world,
without which Church and soul alike could have
no place. If Religion be confined to the Thirty-
Nine Articles or the Westminster Confession,
Shakespeare is not reUgious. If God absents Him
self from the world except on Sundays, and even
then does not venture forth beyond church-doors,
Shakespeare is not religious. If Religion means
severity towards weakness, and crossing the street
that one's eyes may not be offended by the sight of
some common wayfarer, Shakespeare is not reli
gious. But if Religion, besides those accepted mean
ings where Shakespeare does not pretend to foUow
very far, means also to have a sane and far-reaching
outlook upon life; to have broad sympathy with
those who, in aU their weakness and temptation,
are yet God's children; to know good from evil,
and light from darkness ; to point out that the wages
of sin is death, even though it be done sometimes

BROWNING AMONG THE POETS 59
in merry mood; if it is religious to cherish friends,
and to be glad at love received or given ; if it is re
ligious to see in past and present, in history and in
life, the working of the hand of God; then Shake
speare is religious. It does not matter that he does
not preach. After aU, there are better places than
the stage for that. It does not matter that he is not
a creedmaker. That has always been a dangerous
business, and is so stiU. If we seek for aids to de
votion, we may read the "Pilgrim's Progress," or
the "Imitation of Christ." But Shakespeare, as no
other man has ever done, points out for us the re
Ugion that caimot be separated from common Ufe.
Where Shakespeare planted, later poets have
reaped. Some used his thoughts, some used his
words, in some it is not easy to trace his influence
directly, but we are none the less sure that it is
there. He is the gate through which aU who would
enter the enchanted fields must pass. After his
death, and Milton's, there was a long interval dur
ing which the Muse of Poetry refrained her soul,
and kept it low. But in the nineteenth century the
former sluggishness was foUowed by a time of great
activity in England, along aU lines. The stage-

6o PROPHECY AND POETRY
coach and the taUow candle gave way before the
miracles of modern science. In the Church, the
Oxford Movement of 1833 stirred men's hearts,
and twenty years later Maurice and Robertson and
Kingsley quickened their minds. Poetry entered
vigorously into this new life. There was Bums,
bringing a nation to the consciousness of itseU with
his homely " Westlan' jingle ; " and Scott, writing
as if to the sound of martial music; and Byron,
picturing in charming style the joys of hopelessness;
and Coleridge, saying indeed in verse not many
things, but much. Keats brought to modem Eng
land something of the atmosphere of ancient Greece,
and SheUey was idol or bugbear, according to men's
point of view. But in that path where Poetry and
Religion walk together, the first great poet of this
new time was WiUiam Wordsworth.
As with every other poet, there are many times
when Wordsworth is not at his best. He is encum
bered with a great deal of literary baggage, as
Matthew Arnold called it. Sometimes he is pom
pous, sometimes he is intolerably duU, sometimes
his simplicity becomes grotesque. We feel that the
horse who raised hoof after hoof, and never stopped,

BROWNING AMONG THE POETS 6i
might have belonged to "Alice in Wonderland."
Strorks the rhinoceros and Rikki-tikki-tavi the mon
goose each has his place in his own kind of literature,
but the Ass who is the joint-hero in "Peter BeU" is
treated too seriously by the poet for the rest of us
to accord him the respect which he deserves.
But it is iU business to dweU on defects when so
many and so great virtues Ue ready to our hand.
That Wordsworth is often duU means nothing. In
the first place, he was born into a duU and wooden
world, though it was by no means dull and wooden
when he left it. Again, he was a teacher always.
He wishes to be considered that or nothing. And
dulness, in some sort, must be the teacher's privi
lege and prerogative, unless the school-time is to be
one long holiday. Wordsworth's explicit account of
his poetry is that it is "to console the afflicted; to
add sunshine to daylight by making the happy
happier; to teach the young and the gracious of
every age to see, to think and feel, and therefore to
become more actively and securely virtuous." AU
this is edifying, but if it be compared with the ad
ventures of AchiUes or of Don Juan, on their own
terms, it must suffer by the comparison.

62 PROPHECY AND POETRY
Comparison of this sort, however, is absurd.
Wordsworth has scant respect for those who are
heroes by profession. It is the adventure of the
mind, not of the body, for which he cares. The
atmosphere of his work is quiet to the very last de
gree. In "The Excursion," for example, the poet's
whole purpose is not only ethical, but sacramental.
"Of Truth, of Grandeur, Beauty, Love, and Hope,
And Melancholy Fear subdued by Faith;
Of blessed consolations in distress;
Of moral strength, and intellectual Power;"
these things, and others Uke them, are the announced
subjects of the poem. The very scenery is set
against a religious background. We read of Hebrew
prophets and the Scottish Church, of the lonely
chapel in the dale, the churchyard among the moun
tains, the pastor, who "chose the calm deUghts of
imambitious piety, and learning's solid dignity."
There is the poet's thanksgiving for his own peace
ful lot. He is a man "of cheerful yesterdays and
confident to-morrows;" no doubt because his mind
is richly stored, and he has no leanings toward " the
tedium of fantastic idleness." There is the pro
pounding of those questions which men have always

BROWNING AMONG THE POETS 63
asked, which the pastor answers with mild ortho
doxy. There are musings over the quiet resting-
places of the dead. There is the looking forward
and the looking back, that idea of the power of the
past over the present, of the unity and solidarity of
life, of the connection of things and thoughts with
one another, which we find appearing in all of
Wordsworth's poetry in the most unlocked for ways
and places, and which is raised to its highest terms,
and developed with surpassing beauty, in the famous
"Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recol
lections of Early Childhood."
In Wordsworth's articles of poetic faith there are
two main doctrines. One is the sacredness and
living power of Nature. The other is the worth of
Man. As with many another preacher, his teach
ing is often most valuable when it is least obvious.
The "Ecclesiastical Sonnets" are ecclesiastical, and
the "Lines written at Tintern Abbey" are not.
But it is "Tintern Abbey" that shows us the depths
of the poet's reUgious nature.
These two ideas of his often blend into one an
other, and become the two sides of one great truth.
To say that Wordsworth loved the country, as

64 PROPHECY AND POETRY
Virgil loved it, would be far too litde. Its charms
were ever with him, "a note of enchantment" amid
the most unlovely scenes. To Wordsworth Nature
was more than dear. She was holy. For those who
were blind to her, who looked upon her as a stranger
and an alien, no condemnation could be too severe.
"Great God. I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."
But of Wordsworth himself it could never be said
that he saw little in Nature that was his. He pos
sessed her, and he was possessed by her in turn.
There may be some to whom his enthusiasm for
Nature wiU seem unnatural, if the expression be
not too paradoxical. No man can escape altogether
from the influence of his environment, and the
dweUer in dingy city streets, to whom the country
is only so much space that separates him from an
other city, may find it impossible even to under
stand the poet's feeUngs. If this be so, it is the
reader's misfortune, and not the poet's fault. Again,

BROWNING AMONG THE POETS 65
there have been those who have caUed Wordsworth's
teaching concerning Nature Pantheism, the losing
of God through identifying Him with His creation.
But is not Pantheism one of those vague names
which men use when they wish to cast blame upon
what they understand imperfectly, or what they do
not understand at aU? There is a class of words
which we are wont to employ, to use Kipling's
phrase, to "make a magic." Unitarian is such a
word. There were some, of great ingenuity and
highly developed imaginative powers, who applied
it to PhiUips Brooks. His thoughts were not their
thoughts, his point of view was not their point of
view, and, although nothing could be clearer than
his pubUshed utterances regarding the Divinity of
Christ, Unitarian served as a convenient epithet of
reproach. Ritualist, with some, is such a word;
and Latitudinarian, with others. Higher Criticism
is a phrase that can throw into hysterics the igno
rant pious of a certain type. They delight in speak
ing of it as the "so-called Higher Criticism," as if
one were to speak of a so-called horse, or a so-caUed
chair, or a so-caUed sunrise. They do not know
that it may be the most innocent thing in the world.

66 PROPHECY AND POETRY
Pantheism belongs to the same class. It may, no
doubt, mean something most impleasant and most
reprehensible. It may mean nothing at aU. In
Wordsworth's case, whatever may be his thought of
Nature, his poems on other subjects must acquit
him of the charge of losing sight of the personality
of God.
But Nature, with aU his reverence and affection
for it, is only half of Wordsworth's mental store.
It involves the recognition of God, but the world
must be a lonely place until we take account in it
of men of like passions with ourselves. We cannot
love the unseen God unless we love the brothers who
are aU about us. And Wordsworth never speaks
more lovingly of Nature, and with a keener and
deeper appreciation of her power, than when he
makes her "faU back into a second place," and
recognizes frankly that she is not the end of Ufe,
that she is not, to put it into theological phrase, suffi
cient for salvation. Though she has Ufe in herseU,
it needs to be supplemented by another kind of Ufe.
We come then to the poet's second doctrine, of the
worth of Man. He is no aristocrat. The obscure
man, the unfortunate man, the simple child, all

BROWNING AMONG THE POETS 67
draw their breath from God. He cares nothing
for those accidental trappings with which some men
are clothed. He does not call it high life when he
means high Uving, nor talk about the lower classes
when he means the poor. There are none of those
lords and ladies in his poems who walk with so
much dignity through Shakespeare's pages. In
deed, it seems as if he took pains to go to the oppo
site extreme. The Idiot Boy, the Cumberland
Beggar, Michael the old shepherd, "the miserable
mother by the Thorn," — he asks our interest in
these and our sympathy for them, and just as much
of it as Shakespeare could have asked for King
Lear, or the Greek poets for the "dark sorrows of
the line of Thebes." It is the hidden man of the
heart with which he is concerned; and where this
can be found, he feels it infinitely valuable. Per
haps the one poem of Wordsworth that everybody
knows is "We are Seven." It makes no difference
that two of them Ue in the churchyard. As an
other poet puts it, "love is love forevermore." And
this profoundest lesson that man can learn comes
from a Uttle child. There are very few characters
in poetic Uterature who can hold as high a place as

68 PROPHECY AND POETRY
the nameless lad, the companion of the poet's early
days, in the short story of whose Ufe the power of
Nature and the dignity of the simplest human ex
perience are brought together.
"There was a Boy; ye knew him well, ye Cliffs
And islands of Winander. Many a time,
At evening, when the earliest stars began
To move along the edges of the hills,
Rising or setting, would he stand alone,
Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake;
And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands
Pressed closely palm to palm, and to his mouth
Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,
Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls,
That they might answer him. And they would shout
Across the watery vale, and shout again,
Responsive to his call ; with quivering peals,
And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud
Redoubled and redoubled ; concourse wild
Of mirth and jocund din. And, when it chanced
That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill,
Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind

BROWNING AMONG THE POETS 69
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.
"This Boy was taken from his Mates, and died
In childhood, ere he was full twelve years old.
Fair is the spot, most beautiful the Vale
Where he was born; the grassy Churchyard hangs
Upon a slope above the village school;
And through that Churchyard when my way has led
At evening, I believe that oftentimes
A long half-hour together have I stood
Mute — looking at the grave in which he lies."
Shakespeare is the great capitalist of poetic
thought. Wordsworth is provincial, but his province
is among the fairest known to men. It is at a great
distance that Matthew Arnold foUows these, but
StiU he does foUow. His range of thought is limited,
his mastery of words is not remarkable. His
poetry was an accident, we might almost say an
incident, in his life. The cares of this world came
between him and the Muse. The deceitfulness
of riches did not much trouble him, but the pinch
of poverty was only avoided by hard and most
prosaic work. Most of his poetry was written

70 PROPHECY AND POETRY
in his youth. For years he turned away from it,
and spent his inteUectual substance along other
Unes. We must make aUowance for these things
when we come to estimate his poetic worth. He
is no epoch-maker, no miracle of genius. But in
his own sphere he is a poet of wonderful sweetness,
and if he has not much light to cast upon the prob
lems that vex humanity he is not content with dark
ness, but is always seeking, even though he does
not find.
Matthew Arnold the critic helps us to an under
standing of Matthew Arnold the poet. He is not
exactly anxious and worried about many things, —
that is not his way, — but there are many things
about which he is concerned. He goes down to
the sea in ships and does business in great waters;
and sometimes he is out of sight of land, and those
who foUow blindly must be sore distressed. But
back of aU that lightning play of wit, and back of
those reforming schemes of his, haU playful and
haU serious, by which Nonconformists were to be
taught the unloveliness of their clamor for "the
dissidence of Dissent, and the Protestantism of the
Protestant religion," and bishops were to be made

BROWNING AMONG THE POETS 71
more reasonable, and the awful flatness of Philis
tinism was to be seasoned with a little pinch of
Attic salt, Ues something else. These may re
ceive the attention of Matthew Arnold in the world,
but his true home is in
"that sweet dty with her dreaming spires,
Who needs not June for beauty's heightening."
With aU his special pleading and his agitation, he
does not care about bringing men to see things with
his eyes; or rather, if there is spiritual agreement,
he is content to let inteUectual agreement go. Theo
logical sympathy with Newman he had none what
ever, nor could he have had at any time. But that
did not prevent him from seeing in Newman the
most fascinating figure of his day. Those high
gifts, that splendid hope which ended in such bitter
disappointment, that funeral sermon preached by
the dead man over the grave of aU that he had been,
that hiding of Ught under a bushel which is such
a heavy indictment against the Church of Rome,
that old man who had been a leader in the early
days of the century, and who survived, in a sort of
double exUe, almost to its end — this is a history

72 PROPHECY AND POETRY
which might move any man. It moved Arnold
deeply. If he had a keen eye for inteUectual weak
ness, or what he considered inteUectual weakness,
he had a keen eye too for spiritual beauty. He pre
ferred such beauty, even though it might be in error,
to those glaring virtues which, rightly or wrongly, he
attributed to the Puritans and their ecclesiastical
descendants, and which make their possessors —
Arnold would almost have said their victims — so
difficult to deal with at times. As he felt about
Newman, so was it with Oxford also. She was the
"home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and un
popular names, and impossible loyalties." So be
it. But because she was the queen of romance, she
must be the city of the soul.
Some one has spoken of Arnold's system as AngU-
canism minus Christianity. Minus Christianity of a
certain sort it is indeed, but if the letter is lacking the
spirit is present in no smaU measure. He is Uke that
man in Scripture who said he would not go, but did
go, nevertheless. He declares his unbeUef, or rather
his non-belief; he insists upon his uncertainty with
a dogmatism equal to that of the Athanasian Creed
itseU; he denies absolutely the Divinity of Christ, as

BROWNING AMONG THE POETS 73
the Church has always held it, — and then he
substitutes for it a divinity in Christ which it is even
harder to account for or to understand. After the
process described by Bishop Butler, by which any
thing can be made anything, he is by no means with
out skiU in making something nothing. He sees so
clearly that he does not see far. He possesses, to use
one of his own expressions, a "sad lucidity of soul."
He sees the weakness of human nature, and guesses
at its strength. He sees unloveUness, — the truss
factory occupying the finest site in England, the
CoUege of Health, with the beasts which are probably
lions, in the New Road, — and he gives to these an
attention to which they reaUy have no claim. He
sees a theological system which he could never have
constructed, and he lays hold of the mistakes of its
adherents to puU it down. With a lack of imagina
tion not to be looked for in a poet, he asks for proof
of God. He seems to forget that the highest things
in Ufe do not come to us by proof, that faith is quite as
real a power. But we cannot read his poetry with
out feeling that he knows more of God than he is
wilUng to confess.
To a heart naturally Christian — he has "so

74 PROPHECY AND POETRY
much unlearnt, so much resigned " — there is added
a resdess and inconclusive mind. He has always a
compass, pointing fixedly to the pole-star of right
eousness, but there are many times when he seems to
be without a destination. He visits the Carthusian
Monastery on the Grande Chartreuse.
"Waiting between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth, I wait forlorn.
Their faith, my tears, the world deride —
I come to shed them at their side."
Then, after a little, he goes on.
"Achilles ponders in his tent.
The kings of modern thought are dumb ;
Silent they are, though not content,
And wait to see the future come.
They have the grief men had of yore,
But they contend and cry no more.
"Our fathers watered with their tears
This sea of time whereon we sail;
Their voices were in all men's ears
Who passed within their puissant hail.
Still the same ocean round us raves.
But we stand mute, and watch the waves."

BROWNING AMONG THE POETS 75
Here is hopelessness indeed, but hopeless is some
thing that Matthew Arnold cannot be. He looks to
Wordsworth, and "the freshness of the early world,"
rather than to Byron, who bears about "the pageant
of his bleeding heart." Now and again, he prepares
some situation of deep despondency, and then he
escapes from it with a happy smile. He insists that
he does not know, but he has an enviable power of
suggesting glorious things which has led to some of
his noblest work. He is like one of his own sonnets,
in which he describes TertuUian's stern sentence
that there could be no forgiveness for those who had
sinned after baptism.
"He saves the sheep, the goats He does not save."
The Church listened, and made no denial. But then
"she smiled; and in the Catacombs,
With eye suffused, but heart inspired true,
On those walls subterranean, where she hid
Her head 'mid ignominy, death, and tombs,
She her Good Shepherd's hasty image drew —
And on His shoulders, not a lamb, a kid."
It is very much so with Matthew Arnold. Though he
declares that his subject is sadness and uncertainty.

76 PROPHECY AND POETRY
somehow or other it often issues in joy and hope.
This is done by subtle suggestion, rather than by
direct assertion. There is nothing to reUeve the
gloom, but the gloom is reUeved. There is no word
of God, but a mysterious spirit broods over the earth,
and brings peace. The poet has been picturing the
wreck of things. Then he looks away —
"And glorious there without a sound.
Across the glimmering lake,
High in the Valais-depth profound,
I saw the morning break."
It is but a touch. It has no connection with anything
that has gone before. But it carries with it a hope
that no argument could demolish, before which
despondency must fade away.
But there is something more than this hopeful
hopelessness, this glad melancholy. If there is much
that we cannot know, if "the night wind brings up
the stream" only "murmurs and scents of the
infinite sea," there is something that we can know,
and that we must know, if we are to learn to know
ourselves. We have the power, even though it be
with many hindrances, to help and to give light to
one another. This is the thought of the beautiful

BROWNING AMONG THE POETS 77
little poem on "Dover Beach," — the brooding
mystery of life, the removal of those things that can
be shaken as of things that are made, but with it all
the strength and glory of human companionship and
love. Perhaps Arnold's uncertainty is never more
certain of the worst, his melancholy never more fuUy
developed, than in this poem. But though Faith is
disappearing, Love remains. Again and again, he
returns to this refuge. Where Love is present, it
answers those questions which otherwise might be
forever asked in vain.
"Then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the sea where it goes."
The noble lines in memory of his father, Thomas
Arnold, written at Rugby Chapel, with which that
father must always be so closely associated, are Uttle
more than a variation and an elaboration of the same
theme. Man is in need of help. His stronger brother
brings him the help he needs. This power of rescue
helps us to realize the dignity of man. It helps us
to reaUze that faith of which the present holds such
slender store. So, Uke his own Scholar Gipsy,
Arnold goes his way —

78 PROPHECY AND POETRY
"Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
Still clutching the inviolable shade."
When now we pass from Matthew Arnold on to
Tennyson, we find that Faith and Love are still the
chief subjects of our poet's thought. But Faith is no
longer in ecUpse. There are those, indeed, who have
not hesitated to speak of Tennyson as an agnostic.
It is true that he has not done the Apostles' Creed
into verse. He is not one of those dangerous and
intolerable persons who choose to regard themselves
as depositaries of the sum of human knowledge.
With him, as with St. Paul, there are Umits to what
he knows; though, like St. Paul again, he hopes to
know more by-and-by. But, since he is not a teacher
of dogmatic theology but a poet, he knows aU that
there is need for him to know.
The worth of Love — how Tennyson dweUs upon
it, and lets it blaze forth from one briUiant setting
after another. It is native to the golden clime in
which the poet was bom. It transforms the Princess
from a fascinating anomaly into a creature of flesh
and blood. The cimning brain is become a Uving
soul. It lifts Maud's crack-brained lover out of
himseU, and turns his morbid reveries and dreary

BROWNING AMONG THE POETS 79
speculations into exquisite melody. It stands out
through the pessimism and despair of "Locksley
HaU." In "The Two Voices" it was the sight of
father and mother, secure in their double love, and
in the love of the Uttle maiden by their side, that put
gloom and hopelessness to flight; that made the
creeping minutes become the bounteous hours,
and satisfied the soul that, though the old problems
and the old confusion might remain, God's ever
lasting arms were xmderneath.
This is Love at hoUday. But in the storms of life,
when fierce winds sweep down across bleak ice
fields, it has an equaUy important part to play. It is
sometimes said that Tennyson lacks dramatic power,
and no doubt his plays, with aU their cunning
workmanship and skilful elaboration, give color to
the assertion. They compel our admiration of the
author, but the characters themselves do not very
greatly move us. But if he cannot, like Shakespeare,
create men and women of real flesh and blood and
make them Uve their lives before us, he can lay hold
of critical moments, and paint them with a briUiancy
which almost bUnds our eyes with Ught. The short
poem "Rizpah" is but one example out of many.

8o PROPHECY AND POETRY
It is the word of an old woman, whose son has been
hanged in chains, to a charitably-disposed visitor
who has come to administer comfort and what she
seems to regard as orthodox instruction of a suitable
and timely sort. There is not one word of direct de
scription in the poem. From beginning to end it is
the monologue of a crushed and broken soul, to whom
love, and hopeless love, is the one thing left in aU the
world. It is not the love which may receive as weU as
give. It is not love which can look forward, it is
hardly love which can look back. It is not based on
worth, and happiness of any sort bears no relation to
it. But it glorifies the grim surroundings, and blots
out the shame. Love claims boldly, where even
Faith hesitates.
"Heard, have you? What? They have told you he never
repented his sin?
How do they know it? Are they his mother? Are you of
his kin?
"Heard. Have you ever heard when the storm on the downs
began,
The wind that 'ill wail like a child, and the sea that 'ill moan
like a man?
"Election, Election, and Reprobation — it's all very well.
But I go to-night to my boy, and I shall not find him in Hell."

BROWNING AMONG THE POETS 8i
And the love that must have seemed to men so un
availing passed to other regions where man's judg
ment counts for even less than it does here.
But after all it is not in poems Uke this that
Tennyson shows us the exceeding worth of love.
Here we have love spending itself, as it were, upon
its object. But in other ways he shows us how it Ufts
men out of themselves, and gives them a broader out
look and a larger Ufe. The opposite of love is selfish
ness, and in the "Palace of Art" we have a picture of
sel&shness raised to its highest terms, and tricked out
in all its most entrancing garments. It is the world at
its very best, with love eliminated. Never were more
favorable conditions, never was selfishness equipped
with more magnificence. Cameo foUows cameo, as
the poet unfolds those things which make the palace's
beauty. There are cool green courts and cloisters
and galleries and fountains and statues and deep-set
windows and corridors and rooms great and small,
"each a perfect whole
From living Nature, fit for every mood
And change of my still soul."
There are landscapes and legends, and paintings of
the wise men of old. There are even angels bearing

82 PROPHECY AND POETRY
gifts — beautiful angels, to deUght the eye. In choice
mosaic, cycles of human history are worked out.
And there the soul, intent upon herseU and careless
of all else, held her high court. Her separation was
her glory. She needed nothing. Was she not com
plete? She gazed with contempt and loathing upon
those who were less fortunate or learned than herseU.
They were but "darkening droves of swine." This
is her attitude, — a looker-on at Ufe, a patron, but a
patron for no other purpose than the augmentation
of her own dignity and grandeur, a superior being
not to be annoyed nor disturbed by the common cares
of men. But she could not hold it. She lacked the
one thing that makes the difference between death
and Ufe. It is only dead men who can be, in any
real sense, exclusive. In spite of herself, she was
forced to look beyond herseU. No less skilfuUy than
when he reared for her the waUs of the palace, the
poet describes her faU. In aU God's universe, so
strongly knit together, that soul stands alone.
"A spot of dull stagnation, without light
Or power of movement, seemed my soul,
'Mid onward-sloping motions infinite
Making for one sure goal.

BROWNING AMONG THE POETS 83
"A still salt pool, locked in with bars of sand,
Left on the shore; that hears all night
The plunging seas draw backward from the land
Their moon-led waters white.
"Back on herself her serpent pride had curled.
'No voice,' she shrieked in that lone hall,
'No voice breaks through the stillness of this world;
One deep, deep silence all.'
"She, mouldering with the dull earth's mouldering sod,
Inwrapt tenfold in slothful shame,
Lay there exiled from eternal God,
Lost to her place and name;
"And death and life she hated equally,
And nothing saw, for her despair,
But dreadful time, dreadful eternity,
No comfort anywhere.
"She howled aloud, 'I am on fire within.'
There comes no murmur of reply.
'What is it that will take away my sin,
And save me lest I die?' "
To a question like this, and from a poet Uke
Tennyson, there could be but one answer, just as
there could be but one answer from the Gospel. It
is he who is wiUing to lose his life who saves it, it is

84 PROPHECY AND POETRY
he who seeks that finds, it is not when he is alone
but when he sees himseU reflected in a brother's
eye that a man may come to know himseU for what
he is. There is no sin in the beauty of the palace.
Let that remain. The sin Ues in the proud and
seU-sufficient soul.
"So when four years were wholly finished
She threw her royal robes away.
'Make me a cottage in the vale,' she said,
'Where I may mourn and pray.
" ' Yet pull not down my palace towers, that are
So lightly, beautifully built;
Perchance I may return with others there
When I have purged my guilt.'"
"With others" — this marks the difference between
happiness and despair, between love and selfishness,
between human righteousness and sin. The apostle
struck one of the deepest notes of God's way of deal
ing with the world, when, at the end of his history
of faith, he adds that "they, without us, should not
be made perfect." That no man Uves to himseU nor
dies to himseU is more than a truth of ethics. It is
a fact of Ufe.
We have seen that Ufe without love, with seU as its

BROWNING AMONG THE POETS 85
sole object, is but the delirium of madness. Where
love fails and falters, Ufe fails and falters too, as in
the departure of Guinevere from King Arthur's court.
But where love is strong and deep and true it fiUs life
with glory and with a joy against which even death is
powerless. '"T is better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all."
More than any other poet, we must associate Tenny
son with the eulogy of such a love. In 1833 Arthur
Henry HaUam died at Vienna, at the age of twenty-
two. He was buried in the little church which
Tennyson describes, at the meeting of the Severn and
the Wye. A tablet marks his resting-place, and in
tender Latin records the grief of those he left behind.
"Vale Dulcissime; Vale Delectissime Desideratissime."
HaUam was Tennyson's friend. Men have ques
tioned sometimes whether he was worthy of the
monument of verse which the poet has raised to him
in " In Memoriam." But it is a foolish question and
an unnecessary one, even an unworthy one. Perish
the thought that those who love us should estimate
our merits too carefuUy in accordance with our just

86 PROPHECY AND POETRY
deserts. It would fare iU with the best and brightest
if there were not some to exaggerate their abiUties and
their virtues, and to pass by their deficiencies with
unseeing eyes. When Tennyson writes of "his
friend, the brother of his love," no doubt he sees there
what must have been hidden from the world. What
the world might have seen in later years is an aca
demic question which cannot possibly be answered.
MeanwhUe, we have a strong and tender soul teUing
us of his love and of his loss. If it is on the note of
grief that the poem begins, other and sweeter notes
soon enter in. Time has not conquered love, but it
has brought a change. The earth is no longer hung in
black, for it is love rather than grief that shows en
durance. That cannot darken Ufe, with whatever
weight of grief it may be mixed. Rather, it makes
life, and lightens its burdens, and smooths away its
cares. It brings new treasures to heart and mind and
soul. It explains, and brightens, and ennobles. It is
immortal and eternal.
"Love is and was my Lord and King,
And in his presence I attend
To hear the tidings of my friend
Which every hour his couriers bring.

BROWNING AMONG THE POETS 87
"Love is and was my King and Lord,
And will be, though as yet I keep
Within his court on earth, and sleep
Encompassed by his faithful guard,
"And hear at times a sentinel
Who moves about from place to place,
And whispers to the worlds of space,
In the deep night, that all is well."
This is the worth of love, the love of our own kind,
for the love of God is not the poet's subject. But love
of wife, and child, and friend, needs something more
to give it firmness and security. The changes and
chances of this mortal life might overcome it if it
stood quite alone. And so to the strength and force
of love which the poet deUghts to set forth, he adds
the worth of faith. Earth must point to heaven or
else to the absence of heaven, which is heU. One
cannot deal with man, and not sooner or later come
to God. And when one deals with man on his
highest side, as Tennyson does, God must be near.
Sermons on faith are apt to be uninteresting.
Perhaps they approach it too generaUy from its
philosophical side. They do not realize its excessive
naturalness, its extreme simplicity. They are in-

88 PROPHECY AND POETRY
cUned to urge as a duty what is, to a very great
extent, inevitable. Now and then, it almost seems
as if there were men who were trying to apologize for
it. But faith does not need apology. Without it,
life is materialism, a brutal mixture of gold, and
brass, and iron, and strong flint. To Tennyson,
faith is the invincible assurance that there is One
who sees our needs, whose ears are open to our
prayers. If love has seemed to fail us, faith comes
to the rescue. It is not a thick-skinned and weak-
minded optimism, which denies the reality of the
evU that is in the world. It does not dismiss things
that are hard to be understood as unworthy of any
consideration. But always, amidst whatever per
plexities and whatever troubles, it can discern upon
"the low, dark verge of life,
The twilight of eternal day."
It is a faculty of the soul rather than of the mind, to
be felt, and not to be defined with over-zealous care.
It is very far removed from dogmatism. But such
as it is, it is no less real and indispensable than love
itself. The poet has lost his friend, but he wiU not
be the fool of loss. Death has had power to change

BROWNING AMONG THE POETS 89
the current of his Ufe. He recognizes that, of course.
But to the one whom it has taken, he cannot but
beUeve that death has brought its gains. The much-
beloved is becoming "a lord of large experience,"
that by-and-by he may teach those whom he has
preceded. The loss may be described and measured,
but the gain is not done away with because it cannot
be set down in terms of human speech. Faith leads
men from grief and despondency to hope and cheer.
It is indestructible and inextinguishable. No argu
ment can prevail against it, no contradiction prove
it groundless.Before three generations Tennyson set forth these
truths. In one poem after another we find the same
love of love, the same trust in faith, the same con
sciousness of God's besetting presence in the world,
which make the very bone and sinew of his work.
He has no formal creed to present, but he deals with
that in man which make creeds possible. And at the
last there is no weariness, no mournful reverie. For
the old man, close to his journey's end, there are
stiU " so many worlds, so much to do." He is not old.
He is young again, and the future stretches away
before him, sealed by faith and love.

90 PROPHECY AND POETRY
"When the dumb Hour, clothed in black,
Brings the Dreams about my bed,
Call me not so often back.
Silent Voices of the dead,
Toward the lowland ways behind me,
And the sunlight that is gone.
Call me rather, silent voices,
Forward to the starry track
Glimmering up the heights beyond me,
On, and always on."
These are the men with whom Robert Browning
must naturally be compared. There are ways in
which he excels them aU; there are other ways, no
doubt, in which they aU surpass him. There is no
poet about whom so many contradictory things can
be said, and said with truth. One of the cleverest
of the many clever people who have written about
him iUustrates his many-sided conception of the
universe by the old story of five blind men who found
themselves within reach of an elephant. One of
them put his arms about its leg, and declared at once
that an elephant was just a kind of tree. Another
seized its wriggling, waving trunk, and fled in terror
from what he supposed must be a serpent. Another,
taUer perhaps, or coming from a different quarter.

BROWNING AMONG THE POETS 91
leaned against its side, and was satisfied that an ele
phant was like a waU. The man who approached it
from the rear, and made its acquaintance by getting
hold of its taU, insisted that it was a rope; and the
man who ran into its tusk was certain that it was a
sharp and heavy spear. AU of these men had ex
ceUent reasons for the conclusions at which they had
arrived. At the same time, those who are familiar
with elephants must feel that such descriptions, how
ever true so far as they go, stiU leave a great deal to
be suppUed. In this strange world of ours it is not
often that the utterance of a single undisputed and
indisputable truth is aU that is needed upon any
subject. The smaUest things are far too big for any
such short and easy method, the simplest things are
far too complicated. And an elephant is neither
smaU nor simple.
The same old fable applies most admirably to
Browning himseU and the things that men have said
of him, — men who have grasped the obvious and
are content to go no farther. Here comes one, — a
blind man, surely, but yet a blind man whose hand
has touch of truth — and teUs us that the poet is
tedious. If he points in proof to some of the dramas,

92 PROPHECY AND POETRY
or to a poem Uke "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau,"
with aU its subde insight into queer human nature,
the most enthusiastic disciple can at least see what he
means. Another thinks that Browning is fantastic
and grotesque. Where he attracts, where he finds
spiritual kinship — and the relations of a genius may
be very ordinary people, after aU — he binds his
kindred to him heart and soul, deep caUing unto
deep. But where he offends, he offends mightily.
There are exceUent people who take too seriously his
pleasantries about Hobbs and Nobbs, and Nokes and
Stokes, who insist on treating his asides as if they were
the staple of his conversation. It is irreverent, of
course, to laugh in church, but there are times when
laughter is not only innocent, but praiseworthy. Nor
is it a monopoly of those who do nothing else. Then
it becomes imbecUe. Browning can be grotesque, or
he never could have written " Pacchiarotto ; " and
sometimes grotesqueness jostles elbows unpleasantly
with the sublime. But we must remember that the
tail which the bUnd man took for the whole elephant,
though it was a real taU, yet gave a most misleading
and incomplete impression. The elephant was tail,
and something more.

BROWNING AMONG THE POETS 93
Another Uterary offence with which Browning is
often charged is pedantry. It is true, he knows more
words than the dictionary, and more facts than the
encyclopaedia, but he uses these words and facts as
if the whole world knew them as weU as he. It is a
temptation of the ignorant to mistake knowledge for
assumption, to make no distinction between the pos
session of a thing and the vulgar desire to show it
off. But while Browning's range of knowledge is tre
mendous, he never seems conscious of superiority.
It does not seem to occur to him that everyone does
not know just what is Saponian strength, or just who
was George Bubb Dodington. He takes a great
deal for granted, both in his readers, and in his poems
themselves. Again and again he flings us into the
thick of things, without a word to help us to discover
where we are. He teUs us plainly that his poems
were never meant to take the place of a cigar or an
after-dinner nap. If any man wiU read them, he
must work for them. But this is not pedantry, any
more than trigonometry is pedantry. A charge that
carries much more weight is that of obscurity. That
there are times when Browning is obscure cannot be
denied. We are told that Mrs. Carlyle wrote that

94 PROPHECY AND POETRY
she had read "SordeUo" with much interest, and
wanted to know whether SordeUo was a man, or a
city, or a book. He piles his facts up, PeUon upon
Ossa, and then he sets strange words playing hide-
and-seek with one another. If he were writing
sermons for a congregation which, once inside the
church-door, could not escape, or if he were teaching
children too smaU to consult the unabridged diction
ary, this obscurity might be a serious matter. But
in a poet with a message for those who have ears to
hear, but not with the burden laid upon him of pro
viding ears for those who have them not, this is not
the sin which is without forgiveness. It ought not
to be hard to say nothing luminously. If a man has
so much to say that thought and language cannot
always keep step together, we ought not to com
plain that his mind is so fertile that a few tares are
mingled with the wheat. Whoever takes pains with
Browning wiU find that his pains wiU bring him an
exceeding great reward. It is easy to point out flaws
in his workmanship. But whoever is moved by " the
mighty hopes that make us men," whoever is stirred
by the thousand questions that give to Ufe its inter
est, must praise his work.

CHAPTER IV
ISAIAH AND BROWNING
POETRY and Prophecy have not the same
birthplace nor the same history, but in the
hands of the masters there comes a time when
they are bound to meet. It may be said of
Isaiah, without much fear of contradiction, that he
was the greatest prophet which the Hebrew race
produced. Browning's position, of course, is a
much less undisputed one, but, whatever might be
urged against him, there are none who would ven
ture to deny his inteUectual power. Without enter
ing into that dangerous region where comparatives
are made to issue in superlatives, it may not be too
much to say that he had a keener mind, a more
subtle discernment of that which is in man, than
any English-speaking poet since Shakespeare.
Between prophet and poet there Ues an interval of
twenty-five hundred years. One was a Hebrew of
the Hebrews, a dweUer in Jerusalem through a long

96 PROPHECY AND POETRY
Ufe, a student of contemporary poUtics, intensely
interested in the events of his own day, a man with
understanding of the times, who passed his days in
the service of his generation. Any attempt to make
leaiah modern could only end in dismal faUure.
The other was an EngUshman, but an Englishman
who liked his England at a distance, and who turned
away from it to do his work; a man whose spirit
was always of the nineteenth century, at whatever
period the scenes of his poems might be laid. The
very fact that the contrast between them is so glaring
makes their resemblances the more remarkable. We
may confine ourselves at present to a temperamental
likeness between poet and prophet, a similarity of
method rather than of thought.
The word "strenuous" has many modem associa
tions, but the thing which it describes is not a modern
thing, and we may say of Isaiah that he was dis
tinctly a prophet of the strenuous Ufe. He is " very
bold" and vigorous in what he has to say. He has
no patience with Ahaz' weakness. He wiU not listen
to the plans of his countrymen for escaping from one
foe by caUing another to their aid. Let them fight
their own batdes. They wiU find God's help enough.

ISAIAH AND BROWNING 97
When he rebukes, he uses words which could not
possibly be misunderstood. The drunkards of
Ephraim, the ladies of the smart set who wore their
finery at Ahaz' court, must have been duU indeed if
they were ignorant of what the prophet thought of
them. But when he paints those glowing pictures
of a redeemed city, his language is hardly less in
tense. His faith is of the kind that removes moun
tains. It overleaps aU barriers, it knows no obstacles.
The earth shaU be fuU of the knowledge of the
Lord, as the waters cover the sea.
This same intensity we find in Browning. Though
he is a poet, he builds no castles in the air. The pos
sible has for him a sacredness which the impossible,
however briUiant or desirable, could never have. It
is this upon which Bishop Blougram insists with so
much clever subtleness.
"The common problem, yours, mine, every one's,
Is not to fancy what were fair in life
Provided it could be, — but, finding first
What may be, then find how to make it fair
Up to our means; a very different thing."
But the Umits of the possible must not be too easily
marked out, as Blougram himself, for all his worldly
7

98 PROPHECY AND POETRY
wisdom and his easy accommodation to conditions,
hastens to set forth. Something must be conceded
to circumstances, but circumstances cannot be al
lowed to make the man.
"No, when the fight begins within himself,
A man's worth something. God stoops o'er his head,
Satan looks up between his feet, — both tug;
He's left, himself, i' the middle; the soul wakes
And grows. Prolong that battle through his life.
Never leave growing till the life to come."
This is the poet's contention in a hundred ways.
The poet Eglamor dies of the trifling perfection of
his work. It was just because he took things so
easily that SordeUo failed. He would not do evil,
but he did not like to take the trouble to do good.
He had a "strange disbelief that aught was ever to
be done." For him to be what he might have been
seemed a step "too mean to take," and so he never
took it. "'T was a fit
He wished should go to him, not he to it."
He wanted to seem, rather than to be. He was
content to doze at home, if only men thought that
he was singing or fighting somewhere else.

ISAIAH AND BROWNING 99
"A sorry farce
Such life is, after all."
This is the poet's conclusion. For with him life is
for action, not for criticism. This is the cry that
goes up from aU sorts and conditions of the men and
women who figure in his pages. If life is thought of
as a game, it is a game to be played hard, to be
thoroughly enjoyed.
"How sad and bad and mad it was,
But then, how it was sweet ! "
If it is a voyage, it must be undertaken at whatever
risk or inconvenience. If it is a cup, it must be filled
and drained. If it is a battle, it must be fought to
the end, however hot the sun, and thick the smoke,
and close the bullets. And so we find his poems
filled with characters who feel, and feel intensely,
and do what they do with aU the vigor of which a
man is capable. The monk in the Spanish cloister
hates his fellow, and he puts into that hatred a force
which, if it could have been caught and tamed,
might have made him a Saint Paul.
"Gr-r-r-! there go, my heart's abhorrence!
Water your damned flower-pots, do !

100 PROPHECY AND POETRY
If hate killed men, Brother Laurence,
God's blood, would not mine kill you !"
Johannes Agricola meditates upon God. There is
something sublime in the assurance with which he
takes possession of the Divine decrees, and puts
himseU at the very centre of the universe. The rest
of the world he dismisses with an indifferent sentence.
They are as may be, many of them
'in hell's fierce bed,
Swarming in ghastly wretchedness."
It is nothing to him. That is God's work. For
him — "I lie where I have always lain,
God smiles as He has always smiled;
Ere suns and moons could wax and wane.
Ere stars were thundergirt, or piled
The heavens, God thought on me, His child."
And so he is assured he cannot sin. He is to be
guiltless forever, through the Divine predestination,
"fuU-fed by unexhausted power to bless."
When Browning treats of love, there is the same
abandonment, the same fulness of life.

ISAIAH AND BROWNING loi
"Be a god, and hold me
With a charm 1
Be a man, and fold me
With thine arm I
"Teach me, only teach, Love!
As I ought
I will speak thy speech, Love,
Think thy thought."
Love colors aU the world. Where it is present, what
does it matter if the skies are gray ? But where it is
absent, what can it profit though the skies be blue?
Love is more than the victories and triumphs of the
centuries. There are those lines that breathe the
very breath of the Campagna, and that picture so
vividly its ancient glory and its modern decay. This
is the poem's conclusion, — the poem's, and the
poet's. "In one year they sent a million fighters forth
South and North,
And they built their gods a brazen pillar high
As the sky;
Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force —
Gold, of course.
Oh heart ! oh blood that freezes, blood that bums !
Earth's returns

102 PROPHECY AND POETRY
For whole centuries of folly, noise, and sin !
Shut them in,
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest !
Love is best."
We pass on from intensity of feeling to breadth of
view, to wideness of horizon. Isaiah lived in Jeru
salem, but from Jerusalem he looked out over aU
the world. That was his business as a prophet. He
was set upon a watch-tower, that he might declare
what he saw. And he saw much. He was never of
that melancholy company whose eyes reach only as
far as the trough where they feed and the stable
where they Ue. He saw good, and he saw evU. In
time of peace he could see the danger that threat
ened, though it was yet a long way off. In time of
war he could look beyond the fighting and the fear.
Nor was Jerusalem alone the object of his thought.
There is a considerable portion of his book in which
the scene is forever shifting, in which we need to be
always accustoming ourselves to some new point of
view. At one moment he is speaking of some great
world-power, the next of some wandering tribe
whose very name we hear for the first time. Although
his interests are centred at Jerusalem, his long sue-

ISAIAH AND BROWNING 103
cession of oracles concerning foreign nations proves
conclusively that they do not end there. In one
reign after another, his place seems to have been very
near the king. But he was familiar with the move
ment of the world, and it was a movement in which
he himself felt called upon to take a part. For the
very reason that he is a watchman, his gaze must
be upon the nations round about. As he mounts his
watch-tower, he hears the noise of storm and con
flict. There is confusion worse confounded in the
world. "Ah, the booming of the peoples, the mul
titudes, like the booming of the seas they boom ; and
the rushing of the nations, Uke the rushing of mighty
waters they rush ; nations, like the rushing of many
waters they rush." The prophet is no idle spectator,
who notes aU this as a matter of curious information
with which he has no personal concern. It is his
business to bring some kind of order out of this
chaos, to speak words of warning to those who are
in need of warning, to send encouragement to those
who are like men buffeted and driven by the winter
sea. And so we have the burden of Babylon and
Moab and Damascus, of Tyre and of Egypt; the
prophet bears aU these, whether for weal or woe.

104 PROPHECY AND POETRY
No sturdier patriot ever Uved, but his patriotism
does not blind him to the fact that beyond Jerusalem
there lies the world.
In this broadness of vision. Browning again stands
by the prophet's side. It was said of the young
SordeUo, while he was stiU dreaming at Goito, and
wondermg what Ufe might mean —
"Beyond the glades
Of the fir-forest border, and the rim
Of the low range of mountains, was for him
No other world."
It could never have been said of SordeUo's creator.
Most poets have their own constituency of characters,
so to speak, and work with these. They would not
know what to do with other types. Wordsworth's
interest in Goody Blake and Harry GiU, in Peter
BeU and Michael and Lucy, was so great that it
crowded out aU whose lot was cast beyond his moun
tain vaUey. He aimed, no doubt, to be universal in
his thought, but he was provincial in his iUustrations.
Tennyson is not at home except in England. It is
hardly too much to say that the world ends for him
at Dover Beach. Matthew Arnold is concerned
chiefly with the depressed, though the remedies for

ISAIAH AND BROWNING 105
depression which he offers are pleasant to the taste
rather than desirable for food. But Browning's
constituency, like Shakespeare's, is the world. His
range is wide as humanity itself. He is a man, and
there is nothing human with which he has not some
Uving sympathy. There is nothing exclusive in the
mterest with which he looks out upon the world.
Congenial or uncongenial, good or bad, winning a
measure of success or sinking into dismal failure,
there is no man whom he does not find worth while.
He teUs us, at the beginning of "The Ring and the
Book," of the finding of the old manuscript which
gave him the foundation of his story. He was cross
ing the Square of San Lorenzo in Florence, and
stopped before one of those street-staUs where al
most anything that could possibly be sold may find
a place. There were
'Odds and ends of ravage, picture-frames
White through the worn gilt, mirror-sconces chipped.
Bronze angel-heads once knobs attached to chests,
(Handled when ancient dames chose forth brocade)
Modern chalk drawings, studies from the nude,
Samples of stone, jet, breccia, porphyry
Polished and rough, sundry amazing busts
In baked earth, (broken, Providence be praised ! ) "

io6 PROPHECY AND POETRY
There was a web of tapestry, now offered as a mat.
There were books, long faUen from their best estate,
and learning now that misery makes strange bed-
feUows. Perhaps Browning's range of view could
be no better described than in just these lines, and"
others that are no less misceUaneous. He sees every
thing and he goes everywhere. Paracelsus' words
might have been the poet's own —
"What oppressive joy was mine
When life grew plain, and I first viewed the thronged,
The everlasting concourse of mankind."
And so we foUow Waring from England to the utter
most parts of the earth. We see life in Greece and
Israel, in France and Spain and Italy, three thousand
years ago and yesterday. We rise to the heights,
and we catch glimpses of the darkest corners of the
soul. For poet, as for prophet, the world is large.
He who sees far is Ukely to see clearly too. Things
group themselves before him, not in a confused and
unmeaning mass, but in their right perspective and
proportion. Isaiah looked about him, and he saw
men whose views of Ufe were distorted and perverse.
They made a great deal of the outside of things, and

ISAIAH AND BROWNING 107
very Uttle of their inner meaning. They were stick
lers after the letter of the law, while they cared
nothing for its spirit. They were terribly distressed
at the empty threats of those who had no power to
do them harm; but to the real danger of the time,
the menace of Assyria or the guile of Egypt, they
were blind and deaf. Some things they knew, but
they did not know what was most worth the knowing.
They did not consider. They would do anything
rather than think. As Isaiah puts it, almost in so
many words, there were times when they acted as if
the God to whom they were content to give their
patronage was a fool. The delusions and haUucina-
tions of modern days were not yet born, but there
were those with famiUar spirits whom they loved
to seek, and there were wizards who peeped and
muttered. The people were prosperous enough, —
too prosperous; for fulness of pocket may distract
attention from emptiness of mind and heart. " Their
land is fuU of sUver and gold, neither is there any
end of their treasures; their land also is fuU of
horses, neither is there any end of their chariots."
Wealth had become mere impudent materialism,
opportunity was strangled at its birth, those who

io8 PROPHECY AND POETRY
should have been gentlemen and ladies were sots
and clothes-horses. The prophet gives a Ust of the
finery worn by the exclusive women of the court,
who were "haughty, and walk with stretched forth
necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they
go, and making a tinkling with their feet," that he
may set forth its worthlessness under such conditions.
In the same way he catalogues the possession of the
men upon which they pride themselves with such as
surance. There are high towers and fenced walls.
There are ships of Tarshish and pleasant pictures.
There are idols of silver and idols of gold, which
each one has made after his own fancy for himseU to
worship. But not one of these has any power of
continuance. Already evil days are close at hand.
"They shaU look unto the earth, and behold trouble
and darkness, dimness of anguish; and they shaU
be driven to darkness." In that day it is the Lord
alone who shall be exalted, the Lord whom they
have forgotten, and from whom they have turned
away. But while Isaiah draws this sombre picture of
those who at the moment were wearing every out
ward mark of prosperity and success, we must not

ISAIAH AND BROWNING 109
think of him as one whose clearness of vision led
him only to rub all the bright colors out from Ufe.
If he sees very plainly evil when it attempts to mas
querade as good, he sees good also when it is hidden
from every other eye. It is true that there was very
little to be said in praise of those contemporaries of
his of whom he speaks from time to time. But for
Jerusalem itself he never gives up hope. The period
of national security in which his earUer years were
passed was foUowed by a time of restlessness and
threatening danger. The Assyrians were at the
city's very gates, demanding an entrance which it
seemed impossible to prevent. There had been
wUd terror, foUowed by mad despair. With the
people, there was fierce revelry. "Let us eat and
drink, for to-morrow we shaU die." With the king,
there was complete prostration. He covered him
self with sackcloth and ashes, and waited what had
to come. The messengers who had tried to pur
chase peace wept at their failure. There was no
water for the city.
While Jerusalem is in this condition, out of this
turmoil of fear and hideous uncertainty, Isaiah
speaks, and passes it aU by. He does not run away

no PROPHECY AND POETRY
from a task which is too great for him, as the king
had done. He does not try to forget a trouble that
he cannot heal, Uke the people who turned their
panic into a feast. For long he had warned, and
threatened, and pleaded, and prayed. The prophet
of God, he had given himseU up to his people,
though they had shut their ears against him, and
mocked him in the streets. Though he sees visions,
he is no visionary. Because he is a man of God, he
does not turn his back on the affairs of men. But
now he thrusts aside the present, with its noisy in
sistence and its anxious cares. They have thought
enough of these. Many and many a time he has
counseUed concerning them. But now, for Jerusa
lem, there is something more. The present distress,
the assaults of enemies, the unworthiness of the
inhabitants themselves, — none of these can blot
out the fact that it is God's city, and so cannot be
destroyed. And the prophet draws a picture very
different from that which, at the moment, must
have been before his eyes. "Look upon Zion, the
city of our solemnities; thine eyes shall see Jeru
salem a quiet habitation, a tabernacle that shaU not
be taken down; not one of the stakes thereof shall

ISAIAH AND BROWNING in
ever be removed, neither shall any of the cords
thereof be broken." Other nations have their
natural defences, Egypt the Nile, Assyria the Eu
phrates; but they are more strongly guarded.
"There the glorious Lord will be unto us a place
of broad rivers and streams; wherein shall go no
gaUey with oars, neither shaU gallant ship pass
thereby." The confusion that comes from many
voices is at an end. There is but one voice, and aU
hasten to obey it. "The Lord is our judge, the
Lord is our king; He wiU save us." Beyond the
weakness and the helplessness of men Isaiah sees
the unchanging majesty of God.
This power of looking into the very depths of
things may be regarded as part of the necessary
equipment of a prophet. But if its possession in
dicates the power of prophesying, then Browning
must be a prophet too. He is concerned with men
and women of his own creation, but it is no surface
knowledge of them that he gives. He sees them
through and through. He teUs us of what happens
to them, but, more than that, he teUs us what they
are. It is Uttle enough that he knows of the star
that dartles the red and the blue, but it has opened

n2 PROPHECY AND POETRY
its soul to him, for all that. He can put himseU in
other people's places, and look at things from every
point of view, as when, in "The Ring and the Book,"
he teUs the same story a dozen times, always with the
same facts, and always with a different atmosphere.
The Pope sits in judgment on Guido Franceschini.
He would show mercy if he dared. The weight of
his six and fourscore years bears heavily upon him,
and he knows that there is but a moment "whUe
twilight lasts and time wherein to work." Though
he is judge to-day, to-morrow he may himseU be
judged. He has worn through the dark winter day
with winter in his soul beyond the world's. The
more he reads of the documents which have been
submitted to him, the more certain does he become
of Guide's guilt.
"I find this black mark impinge the man,
That he believes in just the vile of life."
He studies the case with care and grave deliberation,
but there is not a moment's hesitation as to his de
cision. He would not dare to die, if he should let
Guido live. But it is not the Pope, nor the opposing
lawyer, nor the victim, nor any of the witnesses of

ISAIAH AND BROWNING n3
the tragedy, who show us Guido at his worst. He
must do that himseU. Just as the Pope, in an act
of severity, reveals his own gentleness of spirit, so
does Guido, in his last appeal for mercy, sink to
the very lowest depths. He has stormed and lied
and blustered. He has rung the changes upon his
cheap bids for sympathy and pity. A common cut
throat, he has grown eloquent as he described him
seU as a knight-errant. Now aU that is past. The
last appeal has been taken, and the time has come
when he must pay the penalty. He has been a
soldier. Just now he was praising the Athenian
who died drinking hot buU's blood, worthy of a
man. Surely, he wiU have no fear of death. But
his orderly discourse becomes more and more frag
mentary and disjointed until it ends in a very agony
of terror.
"Who are these you have let descend my stair?
Ha, their accursed psalm ! Lights at the sill !
Is it Open they dare bid you? Treachery!
Sirs, have I spoken one word all this while
Out of the world of words I had to say?
Not one word ! All was folly— I laughed and mocked !
Sirs, my first true word, all truth and no lie,
8

n4 PROPHECY AND POETRY
Is — save me notwithstanding! Life is all.
I was just stark mad, — let the madman live
Pressed by as many chains as you please pile.
Don't open ! Hold me from them ! I am yours,
I am the Granduke's, — no, I am the Pope's.
Abate, — Cardinal, — Christ, — Maria, — God. . . .
Pompilia, will you let them murder me? "
The white light of Browning's genius shines into
every nook and cavern of Guide's soul, and we
know that this is the way that one who was a cow
ard and a bully aU his Ufe long would feel in the
presence of death.
But Browning, like Isaiah, can do more than
search the depths of Ufe. He can discern nobUity
where it might never have been guessed at. There
could be no better example of this than the old
Grammarian, who at first sight is very far from be
ing an heroic figure. There were long years of toil,
when no one ever heard his name. His youth went
by. His eyes grew leaden, and then dross of lead.
He was racked with pain and coughing. His work
was duU. The settling Hoti's busmess cannot much
stir the blood. There were those who would have
called him from his task, but he would not so much

ISAIAH AND BROWNING 115
as listen to their words. This was the purpose that
he set before him —
"That before living he 'd learn how to live —
No end to learning;
Earn the means first, — God surely will contrive
Use for our earning."
And so he labored on, resting securely in this faith.
The throttling hands of death surprised him whUe
he was stiU intent upon the same duU task. There
were many to whom it must have seemed a wasted
and cheerless Ufe. But not his disciples. They
knew what it aU meant, and why he left the world
to take its way.
"Others mistrust and say, 'But time escapes;
Live now or never ! '
He said, 'What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes!
Man has Forever.' "
And so, when at last the tired body was compeUed
to rest, his pupils bore him on their shoulders to the
mountain top.
"Here's the top peak; the multitude below
Live, for they can, there;
This man decided not to live but Know —
Bury this man there?

n6 PROPHECY AND POETRY
Here — here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,
Lightnings are loosened.
Stars come and go. Let joy break with the storm.
Peace let the dew send.
Lofty designs must close in like effects;
Loftily lying,
Leave him — still loftier than the world suspects,
Living and dying."
It is as inevitable as Guido's panic frenzy. For
such a man there could be no other burial-place.
So closely do poet and prophet come together in
the ways in which they set about their work. With
each of them there is the same enthusiasm of Uving,
the same vigorous utterance, the same appreciation
of the worth of what they have to do. With each of
them there is the same wide vision, the same instinct
of cathoUcity. With each of them there is the same
clear insight into what would never have been re
vealed to common eyes. As we carry our comparison
more into matters of detaU, we shaU find that the
Ukeness between them becomes greater rather than
less.

CHAPTER V
THE USE OF ASSYRIA
THERE are two dark backgrounds against
which Isaiah writes. About the first of
these there is nothing especiaUy pecuUar nor
unique. It is the common story of national
sin, of low standards, of popular corruption, of gen
eral demoraUzation in the state. A Utde earUer, it
had been Hosea's burden in Israel. A Uttle later,
it was to be Jeremiah's burden — the same evil per
sisting under new conditions. It is the story which
Juvenal and Persius teU of imperial Rome. It has
been the wretched subject of many moralists and
satirists in many lands.
There is a dreary monotony about Usts of sins.
Perhaps there is no better way of setting forth that
wickedness is not only wicked, but that it is duU
and stupid too. There is nothing new here, noth
ing original, nothing but the same dead level of
brutality and degradation. Upon one form of vice

ii8 PROPHECY AND POETRY
after another the prophet calls down woe, but aU of
them alike come from contented ignorance and
brazen self-satisfaction. The miserable people have
succeeded in destroying the very foundations of
righteousness. Not only do they make sport of life,
and blot out from it aU that is high and holy, but
they caU things by false names, and even whUe they
sin lay claim to virtue. They call evU good and good
evil. They put darkness for light, and Ught for
darkness; and bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.
As for God, they have banished Him from His own
world. "The harp and the lute, the tabret and
the pipe and wine are in their feasts, but they re
gard not the work of the Lord, neither have they
considered the operation of His hands." At the
very beginning of his book, Isaiah, as one who has
the right to speak for God, calls heaven and earth
to heed the Divine complaint. "I have nourished
and brought up children, and they have rebeUed
against me. The ox knoweth his owner, and the
ass his master's crib; but Israel doth not know,
my people doth not consider. Ah, sinful nation, a
people laden with iniquity, a seed of evU-doers,
children that deal corruptly; they have forsaken

THE USE OF ASSYRIA ng
the Lord, they have despised the Holy One of Israel,
they are estranged and gone backward." Under
whatever forms it might manifest itself — and its
name was Legion, as in later days — this was the
mother-sin, the source and breeding-place of all
the rest. And so the prophet speaks to his coun
trymen a parable of condemnation. In haU a dozen
verses we find the tender love which trusts and
gives; the hope which must always go with great
opportunity; the stern justice which is compeUed,
in spite of itself, fo seek its own; the righteous in
dignation which cannot be suppressed when there
is bitter disappointment which ought never to have
been. "Let me sing for my well-beloved a song of
my beloved touching his vineyard. My well-beloved
had a vineyard in a very fruitful hill; and he made
a trench about it, and gathered out the stones
thereof, and planted it with the choicest vine, and
built a tower in the midst of it, and also hewed out
a wine-press therein; and he looked that it should
bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes."
This is no story without a meaning. Isaiah caUs
on those who hear to speak. "And now, O inhab
itants of Jerusalem and men of Judah, judge, I

120 PROPHECY AND POETRY
pray you, betwixt me and my vineyard. What
could have been done more to my vineyard, that I
have not done in it ? Wherefore, when I looked that
it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wUd
grapes ? And now go to ; I wiU teU you what I wUl
do to my vineyard; I wUl take away the hedge
thereof, and it shall be burnt up ; I wiU break down
the fence thereof, and it shaU be trodden down;
and I wiU lay it waste; it shaU not be pruned nor
hoed, but there shaU come up briers and thorns; I
wiU also command the clouds that they rain no rain
upon it." Could there be the sUghtest doubt as to
the appUcation of the parable? But the prophet
remembers how duU of mind and hard of heart his
hearers are. He wiU take no risks with those who
are slow to understand. This is a picture of them
selves, of the blessings which God has showered
upon them, of the results which their own indiffer
ence and negligence must surely bring. "The vine
yard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and
the men of Judah his pleasant plant ; and he looked
for judgment, but behold oppression ; for righteous
ness, but behold a cry."
The sin of his people must, of course, have ex-

THE USE OF ASSYRIA 121
erted a powerful influence upon Isaiah's work. It
was this which he had to combat and resist. But
there is another factor which comes no less promi
nently forward in his book. It may happen on a
summer afternoon that the sky is obscured by
thunder-clouds which spread from point to point
until they have fiUed the whole horizon. Then,
back of them, partly concealed by them, but mak
ing the blackness even blacker than it was before,
there shines a dull, uncanny light. It is of none of
those colors which we are wont to see. It cannot
be described. It cannot be explained. It can only
terrify. We do not know what it means, but we
know that it means something out of the common
run, and something dangerous. It may be a violent
wind which shaU uproot trees and tear down houses.
It may be hail which shaU pelt, and batter, and
bruise. But, whatever it is, it is grim and myste
rious, the more alarmiag from our very uncertainty
about it.
Something of this sort was the outlook from
Jerusalem in Isaiah's day. The sm of the people
hid the heavens. • But beside the sin which many
enjoyed and a few rebuked, there was a power which

122 PROPHECY AND POETRY
sooner or later must be reckoned with. In Isaiah's
earUer chapters there are several aUusions to the
Assyrians. At first, they were hardly more than a
name, albeit a name to conjure with, like the ogres
which faithless nurses use to frighten children, and
depress their too abounding spirits. They were
surrounded by that glamor which the remote and
the unfamiliar always wears. They were too far
away, too shadowy, to inspire more than a vague
feeling of unrest. Then they came nearer. What
they lost in mysteriousness they gained in the sheer
terror that their aspect caused. They are no longer
a strange people, hovering about the Northern
horizon, objects almost as much of curiosity as of
fear. They have emerged from their obscurity, and
the part which they play in the field of international
politics is no longer a hypothetical one. Their own
records teU us something of their methods of making
war. They speak of tempests of clubs, and deluges
of arrows; of chariots with scythes, the wheels of
which are clogged with blood; of baskets stuffed
with the salted heads of those who have dared to
array themselves against them. Isaiah describes
the swiftness of their movements, the irresistible

THE USE OF ASSYRIA 123
force of their attack, and the hideous desolation
which they bring. " They shall roar against them in
that day Uke the roaring of the sea and if one look
unto the land, behold darkness and distress, and the
light is darkened in the clouds thereof."
When the Assyrian speaks for himself, we have
seU-satisfaction carried to the superlative degree.
"Are not my princes altogether kings?" He names
one town after another which has been laid waste
before him. AU are alike in that baptism of blood
and fire which he brings. " Is not Calno as Car-
chemish? Is not Hamath as Arphad? Is not Sa
maria as Damascus?" The same destruction has
included all. And as it has been, shall it not be
still ? ShaU he who has always been victorious now
fear defeat ? The experience of the past brings con
fidence. " ShaU I not, as I have done unto Samaria
and her idols, so do to Jerusalem and her idols?"
Not only are aU enemies alike to this proud con
queror. The worship of idols is the only worship
which he can understand. The gods of aU nations
he despises with the same scorn.
But this very confidence marks out the way for
his destruction. He is too sure of himself and of his

124 PROPHECY AND POETRY
power. In his own eyes he is strong, and wise, and
prudent. As a boy robs a bird's nest, he has scat
tered every nation that came in his way, and there
was no resistance. "There was none that moved
the wing, or opened the mouth, or peeped." But
he has forgotten God, whose instrument he is.
"Shall the axe boast itseU against him that heweth
therewith? Or shall the saw magnify itself against
him that shaketh it?" The prophet's indignation is
kindled against the insolence of mere brute force.
They who have been the blind messengers of God's
punishment must bring upon themselves a heavier
punishment than any they have inflicted. Like
those whom they have chastised, they have had
eyes which could not see, and ears which could not
hear the voice of God. They go on their way in
aU their pomp of power. But there is One with
whom they have not reckoned. Let them beware.
At the very moment of triumph they wiU find their
prey snatched from their expectant hands, they wiU
find their proud imaginings fading to nothing.
There is tremendous dramatic intensity in the
prophet's description of their onward march. They
come closer and closer. One place after another

THE USE OF ASSYRIA 125
faUs before them. In the succession of names,
strange and unfamUiar though they are to us, we
seem to hear the very crash of things. It is the
overture to some grim tragedy. It is the account,
indeed, of a march which never took place, but it
expresses the feelings which the real march caused.
The opposing force has reached the border. "He
is come to Aiath, he is passed to Migron; at Mich-
mash he hath laid up his carriages." He surmounts
whatever might have hindered his advance. "They
are gone over the passage ; they have taken up their
lodging at Geba; Ramah is afraid; Gibeah of Saul
is fled." Consternation and dismay come with
them. "Lift up thy voice, O daughter of GaUim;
cause it to be heard unto Laish, O poor Anathoth."
The country is made desolate before them. "Mad-
menah is removed ; the inhabitants of Gebim gather
themselves to flee." And now the end has come.
"As yet shaU he remain at Nob that day; he shaU
shake his hand against the mount of the daughter
of Zion, the hiU of Jerusalem." But suddenly a
new power comes upon the scene. "Behold, the
Lord, the Lord of hosts I " His onward progress
could not be traced from place to place, for He has

126 PROPHECY AND POETRY
been always with the city. But the Assyrian has
had his day, has boasted his last boast. The Lord
"shaU lop the bough with terror; and the high ones
of stature shaU be hewn down, and the haughty
shall be humbled."
This was Isaiah's forecast, comparatively early in
his career, of what must certainly take place. The
event justified his judgment. It was God Him
seU who had chosen the Assyrians for their work.
Again and again Isaiah speaks of them as the in
struments of a Divine vengeance upon those who
had forgotten the Divine. We have seen the hold
which luxury and vanity had gained upon Jerusa
lem. If reformation from within had become im
possible, the Lord would bring upon them a reforma
tion from without. The prophet uses a vigorous
and striking figure. The king of Assyria should be,
as it were, a razor, with which the Lord might shave
the land. The people must eat the food of scarceness,
and where there had been a thousand vines there
should be thorns and briers. " I wiU send him against
an hypocritical nation, and against the people of my
wrath wiU I give him a charge." Prosperity had
spoUed Jerusalem. The Assyrians bring that time

THE USE OF ASSYRIA 127
of trial and distress which will open the way for
better days. But they could not understand their
position as God's messengers. "Howbeit he mean
eth not so, neither doth his heart think so ; but it is
in his heart to destroy and cut off nations not a few."
And so we come to the final catastrophe. For a long
time Assyria had been but a menace in the distance.
There were other triumphs which were more con
venient. But now the Assyrian army stood at the
very gates of Jerusalem. There was nothing lack
ing to mark the treachery and insolence of the foe.
He took the tribute, stripped from the temple, which
King Hezekiah offered, and then he came back again,
with fresh threats and even more humiliating de
mands. The king of Assyria sends his messenger,
the Rabshakeh, as he was caUed, to blow his master's
trumpet and to put forth all the vulgar powers which
might terrify. He stands without the wall and argues,
and his argument is scarcely less savage than his
attack. "What confidence is this wherein thou
trustest?" This is the question which his master,
the great king, bids him ask. Is it in Egypt? But
Egypt is no more to be relied on than Assyria. It
is the cynical judgment of a knave upon another

128 PROPHECY AND POETRY
knave whom he knows to be no better than himseU.
Is it in God ? That is even more preposterous. What
can God do for them? God cannot be bought nor
sold nor played with. Then God is a whoUy negli
gible quantity, a mere Ulusion. How about Hamath
and Arphad and Sepharvaim ? This is the argument
with which the Assyrian meets any argument that
may arise. There was no God found to keep these
from falling into his hands. Why should Jerusalem
expect to fare better? We have egotism triumphant,
and conceit appearing as the supremest quality of
success. AU this was in the ears of the people, and in a lan
guage that they could understand. But there was a
message for the king as weU. There is the same cold
blooded impudence, the same effrontery, the same
assurance of easy victory. Hamath and Arphad
walk across the scene, as is their unhappy wont, and
are attended by a retinue of others who are in like
case with themselves. Let not God deceive him.
He shaU be utterly destroyed.
Then Hezekiah goes into the temple for the second
time. But this time it is not that he may strip it of
its beauties with which to bribe his foe. He is in

THE USE OF ASSYRIA 129
sore distress, and the narrative teUs us how he meets
his trouble. The very simplicity of the record adds
to its impressiveness. "Hezekiah received the letter
from the hand of the messengers, and read it; and
Hezekiah went up unto the house of the Lord, and
spread it before the Lord." The king at least had
learned the lesson which the prophet had been al
ways teaching, that temporizing and half-way
measures were in vain, that there was but one source
from which lasting help could come. He paid no
heed to the taunts of his scornful foe. Hamath and
Arphad and their fate brought him no dismay. He
prayed for deliverance. He looked to heaven for
that safety which seemed so far away from earth. It
was the moment of extremest danger, and in that
moment we have the confession of Isaiah's faith.
" Thus saith the Lord concerning the king of Assyria ;
he shaU not come into this city, nor shoot an arrow
there, nor come before it with shields, nor cast a
bank against it. By the way that he came, by the
same shaU he return, and shall not come into this
city, saith the Lord. For I wiU defend this city to
save it for mine own sake, and for my servant David's
sake." It was even as the prophet had said. In a
9

130 PROPHECY AND POETRY
moment there came that mysterious destruction of
which we read in Isaiah and in the Second Book of
Kings. There was no attack, no force of arms, no
human interposition. Was it the breath of pestilence,
or what ? The record only teUs us that the angel of
the Lord went forth, and carried death. An hour ago
there was wUd disorder and despair within the city.
Now there is calm. "Where is he that counted?
Where is he that weighed the tribute? Where is he
that counted the towers before he made ready to
puU them down?" They have aU vanished. That
deep speech wiU be heard no more in threats against
the city, that stammering tongue which they could not
understand is stiU. Instead of chaos and commotion
there is peace. There is a psalm which evidently
refers to this event. We see the discomfiture of those
who had come up against the holy city. Fear and
sorrow have come upon them, as upon a woman in
her travail. They are broken like ships of the sea
before the east wind. But God's city is eternally
secure. There is no part of her that is not sacred,
that is not beloved. "Walk about Zion, and go
round about her, and teU the towers thereof. Mark
weU her bulwarks, set up her houses, that ye may

THE USE OF ASSYRIA 131
teU them that come after. For this God is our God
for ever and ever; He shall be our guide unto
death." In Isaiah's view, then, the use of Assyria was this.
It was an instrument which God employed to punish
a disobedient and gainsaying people. It was an
instrument, for it must be wielded; it could not
wield itself. The hand which smote with it might
withhold it also ; and if in the smiting there was re
vealed the Divine anger, in the withholding there
was revealed the Divine power and the Divine love.
To the Jews who beheld the fury of the Assyrian
attack it might weU have seemed as if it were over
whelming and irresistible; but its force only bore
witness to the greater might of Him who could bring
it to an end. To the nations of that day there must
have been many times when Assyria appeared as an
insolent and blatant buUy, to be feared and hated.
It was not hard for Isaiah to sympathize with this
conception. Even for him, especiaUy in his earlier
days, it was a half-truth; but as the years went by
he came to see that it was that half of the truth which
was the least worth knowing. Whatever Assyria
might be in itseU, — and it was everything that was

132 PROPHECY AND POETRY
terrible and brutal, — its value to the prophet lay in
the fact that, in spite of itseU, it was compeUed to
show forth God's power. In the Assyrian armies,
their impetuous advance and their sudden check,
Isaiah saw a Uving Ulustration of the great truth that
wind and storm do but fulffl God's word. They
sought to inspire terror in themselves, and their
fiercest attack issued in the profoundest peace. It
was through Assyria that Jerusalem came to under
stand herseU and God.
When now we pass from Isaiah to Browning, from
the eighth century before Christ to the nineteenth
century of the Christian era, we find ourselves of
course in an entirely new atmosphere. Assyria in
our own day would be an impossible anachronism.
Moreover, the poet, unlike the prophet, is no re
former. He is concerned with the principles of
righteousness, but the detaUs of unrighteousness,
whether individual or national, are beyond his
province. He has none of that feeUng of personal
responsibUity for the people's sin which pressed so
heavily upon Isaiah, But whUe the gods Uke winged
buUs have long since had their day, and while that
uncouth speech which once struck terror to men's

THE USE OF ASSYRIA 133
hearts is represented for us only by a few inscriptions
which antiquarians painfully decipher, the ancient
prophet and the modem poet are concerned with
the same truth. Say what we will, there is a tyranny
of Ufe which cannot be denied. There is a pressure
of material things upon us from which there is no
escape. The Assyrian in his modern form is no less
conspicuous, though he may be less, picturesque,
than in the days when Isaiah and Hezekiah knew
him. He makes the same proud boastings, and we
know that they are not empty threats. He can point
to the experience of the past in proof of his power.
Calno is as Carchemish. Samaria is as Damascus.
Why should Jerusalem escape? The noise of his
approach is heard in the distance. He comes
nearer and nearer. One outpost after another has
faUen before him. Aiath and Migron, Ramah and
Madmenah, are at his mercy. In a moment, he wiU
be thundering at the city gates. Is there need to
translate him into the language of modern life ? He
stands for aU those forces which distress, and frighten,
and hold our manhood in contempt. He is the per
sonification of insolent and brutal strength, without
inteUigence, without compassion, without mercy,

134 PROPHECY AND POETRY
without love. He is in the world to conquer and
destroy. He is death, with aU that there is about it
of grimness and horror. He snatches men from
their homes, and carries them into desolate regions
where aU things are strange. He is decay, the failing
of the powers of Ufe, the evU days when the doors
shaU be shut in the streets, and the grasshopper shaU
be a burden, when the sUver cord is loosed, and the
golden bowl is broken. He is sickness — the trem-
bUng heart, and failing eyes, and sorrow of mind,
when there is fear day and night, and man has no
assurance of his Ufe. He is disappointment in its
thousand forms. How many a man begins to buUd,
and is not able to finish. How many a man plants,
and another reaps the harvest. How many a gaUant
undertaking ends in faUure. And all these things,
the power of materiaUsm in every aspect and from
every point of view, the world without the spirit, the
army of adversaries that beleaguer the body and
besiege the soul, the Assyrian seems to stand for. It
is idle to deny their power. It is real. Men must
die. Men must grow old. Men must be laid aside
from work in the midst of their years, with plans
half carried out, FaUure of some sort Ues in wait

THE USE OF ASSYRIA 135
for aU of us, except indeed for those unfortunates
who aspire to nothing, and so are at the lowest
possible level aU the time. The world presses,
and lays its heavy burden on our backs. Calno
is as Carchemish. Hamath is as Arphad. Sa
maria is as Damascus. So it has been. So it wiU
ever be.
No optimism can deny this. No cheerfulness of
disposition can overlook it. No faith can dismiss
it as a phantom. Browning recognizes it in a hun
dred ways. But for poet, as for prophet, the last
word on the subject has not yet been said. There is
another power in the world with which the forces of
disintegration and decay must measure strength,
and, however strong they are, the other power is
found stronger stiU. Rabbi Ben Ezra looks without
misgiving on the coming of old age. Its very in
firmities reveal something of God which could not
be revealed before. The fierceness of life's battle
bears witness to the supreme importance of the re
sult. DuU circumstance may interfere with accom-
pUshment, but it cannot interfere with aspiration,
and it is aspiration by which Ufe is measured, after
all.

136 PROPHECY AND POETRY
"Then welcome each rebuff
That turns earth's smoothness rough,
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go.
Be our joys three parts pain.
Strive, and hold cheap the strain;
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe."
It is the striving that brings out man's strength. It
is the pang which proves his power of endurance.
It is the daring which tests his courage.
In one of Browning's short poems, "Instans
Tyrannus," we have what might almost be a com
mentary on the chapters of Isaiah which describe
the Assyrian arrogance and the Assyrian overthrow.
It is the monologue of a tryant who has selected one
of his subjects for his especial hatred. There was
no reason for this fierce disUke; a fact which made
it all the fiercer. There is no hatred so maUgnant as
that which springs of itself from the sUme and ooze
of some corrupt and bitter nature. The tyrant taxed
his ingenuity to the utmost that he might plague and
vex his victim. He crushed him to earth with sheer
dead weight of persecution. He tempted him with
most consummate treachery.
"I set my five wits on the stretch
To inveigle the wretch."

THE USE OF ASSYRIA 137
And then, at the last, he takes the true Assyrian
attitude. Has he not always had his way ? ShaU he
not have it stiU? Shall this man find safety in his
insignificance, when the king himself condescends
to hate ? The moment of his malicious triumph is
at hand. "I soberly laid my last plan
To extinguish the man.
Round his creep-hole, with never a break,
Ran my fires for his sake;
Overhead, did my thunder combine
With my underground mine;
Till I looked from my labor content
To enjoy the event."
So far as the tyrant could see, nothing was wanting
to the accomplishment of his design. He had only
to wait, and watch his victim's fruitless struggle, and
prolong the agony as much as possible. "He shaU
shake his hand against the mount of the daughter
of Zion." He setded himseU in glad anticipation.
So far as he could see, all was in readiness. But the
hitch came in his plan because he could not see the
whole horizon. The eyes of tyranny, of brute force
which becomes brutality, are not very sharp. For

138 PROPHECY AND POETRY
aU his strength the Assyrian had no insight into
spiritual things. Whatever was not like himself,
he dismissed with the same contemptuous indiffer
ence. In his vocabulary, aU gods were aUke. He
did not permit them to interfere with his designs.
So with this tyrant. He had made his plans. Now
he would carry them out. What could prevent?
Is not Hamath as Arphad ? But let us hear his own
account of the conclusion. Were they two, oppressor
and oppressed, to be the only actors in the scene ?
"When sudden . . . how think ye, the end?
Did I say, without friend?
Say rather, from marge to blue marge
The whole sky grew his targe
With the sun's self for visible boss,
While an Arm ran across
Which the earth heaved beneath like a breast
Where the wretch was safe prest.
Do you see ? Just my vengeance complete,
The man sprang to his feet,
Stood erect, caught at God's skirts, and prayed.
— So, I was afraid."
The tyrant's power revealed God's greater power.
He who was threatened with destruction found
safety and peace in the very extremity of his plight.

THE USE OF ASSYRIA 139
The same idea is developed in a somewhat differ
ent way in one of the scenes in "Pippa Passes." We
are shown a gang of silly students whose uncouth
spite vents itself against their comrade Jules. He
has been heard to caU them dissolute, brutaUzed,
heardess bunglers, — and the remark was libeUous
because it was so true. With fiendish ingenuity,
they contrive to entrap him into a marriage with a
beautiful fool. To wreck his life is a smaU punish
ment for his low opinion of themselves. But he wiU
not let his lUe be wrecked. He takes the evU that
they have done him, and makes it over into good.
They have deceived him. There is no denying that.
He must give up the ideals which he had set before
himself. The old life which he had planned has
become impossible. He cannot make sculpture his
first object, as he had intended. Then he wiU under
take the shaping of a soul,
"Here is a woman with utter need of me.
This body had no soul before, but slept
Or stirred, was beauteous or ungainly, free
From taint or foul with stain, as outward things
Fastened their image on its passiveness;
Now it will wake, feel, live, — or die again.

140 PROPHECY AND POETRY
Shall to produce form out of unshaped stuff
Be Art — and further, to evoke a soul
From form be nothing? This new soul is mine."
He has been tied to this woman for his own
imdoing. He turns it into the occasion of her
making. There are a number of poems of various kinds,
ranging in character from "Abt Vogler" to "Fifine
at the Fair," in which Browning speaks in an in
cidental way of the manner in which evU may be
forced to do the work of good in its own despite.
The very incidental quaUty, as of something which
may be taken for granted without argument or ex
planation, shows how deeply the idea was rooted in
the poet's mind. No doubt the most conspicuous
and striking iUustration of it is found in Browning's
great masterpiece. "The Ring and the Book" is
the story of a sordid and brutal murder. The poet
brings before us a Uttle world, the world of Rome
two hundred years ago, and we see its people Uving
their Uves before our eyes. Guido Franceschini has
kiUed his wUe Pompilia, and as if to insure good
measure and settle aU old grudges at a single reck
oning, he has included her old foster-parents in the

THE USE OF ASSYRIA 141
slaughter. Had she not fled from him, and fled with
a priest ? And had they not deceived him about her
at the first, by making him think that she would be
worth money to her husband, and were they not now
giving her aid and succor in her flight ? The people
are greatly excited over this deed that has been com
mitted in their midst. It is the talk of the street and
of the town. Wherever one goes, one may hear
judgments upon it — judgments, as is their wont,
which reveal much more accurately those who pro
nounce them than those on whom they are pro
nounced. But little by little, out of the mass of half-
information and exaggeration, of contradiction and
distortion, of prejudice and sympathy and prudish-
ness and pity, we come to see the truth, Pompilia
was married to this man at twelve years old. She
married him because her mother bade her, as she
would have run an errand, or swaUowed a dose of
bitter medicine, Guido was old, ugly, wicked; but
he was of the aristocracy, and the peasant-mother's
eyes were dazzled by the glare. As for his motives,
we may let the Pope speak, in that searching analysis
which he brought to the final consideration of the
case.

142 PROPHECY AND POETRY
"Not one permissible impulse moves the man,
From the mere liking of the eye and ear,
To the true longing of the heart that loves.
No trace of these; but all to instigate.
Is what sinks man past level of the brute,
Whose appetite if brutish is a truth.
All is the lust for money; to get gold, —
Why, lie, rob, if it must be, murder. Make
Body and soul wring gold out, lured within
The clutch of hate by love, the trap's pretence.
What good else get from bodies and from souls?
This got, there were some life to lead thereby,
— What, where, or how, appreciate those who tell
How the toad lives; it lives, — enough for me."
This was the life to which PompiUa was con
demned. She had had scarcely a thought beyond
her doUs. Now she is taken from her friends, in
sulted, scorned, humUiated, degraded. She bore it
for four years, but with the approach of motherhood
she could not bear it longer. She would not bring a
new life into that vile place. She sought for means
to escape, and found a friend in Giuseppe Capon-
sacchi, a young priest to whom Guido himseU had
sent forged letters in the hope that he might entrap
PompiUa into unfaithfulness. But Guido did iU to

THE USE OF ASSYRIA 143
judge other men by himseU. Caponsacchi was
moved, not by Pompilia's beauty, but by her woes.
He rescued her from her jailers at Arezzo, and she
came at last in safety to her parents' house at Rome.
Though Guido foUowed them, and overtook them,
and brought against them his false charges with
every air of righteous indignation and injured inno
cence, he could not again obtain possession of his
victim. He bided his time. After a litde, when she
had been luUed into security by an interval of peace,
he came to her father's house at night with hired
murderers, and aU who were there were stabbed to
death, Pietro and Violante died at once. Pompilia,
with twenty-two wounds upon her, lived four days.
But it was long enough for her to teU her story.
Truly, it was the atmosphere of old Assyria that
she had breathed, with something of Egypt's subtUty
and guile included. All about her were hate, colossal
seffishness, the power of brute force, "fox-faced this,
cat-clawed the other," with Guido, whose kindness
was worse than his dislike. The story begins in
blackness, and ends in blood. But out of it, what
issues ? For all the long dark hours, for all the dim
twUight when men strained their eyes, and could not

144 PROPHECY AND POETRY
teU what they saw, the sunlight of God's presence
breaks at last upon the world, Caponsacchi stands
before the judges, and teUs them what were some of
his former theories of life. He had hesitated a Uttle
before he became a priest. The vows were too hard
for him to bear. Then came a superior and explained
them to him.
"Guiseppe Maria Caponsacchi mine,
Nobody wants you in these latter days
To prop the Church by breaking your backbone, —
As the necessary way was once, we know,
When Diocletian flourished, and his like."
Now, something else is required, something which is
regulated according to the ability of each.
"I have a heavy scholar cloistered up,
Close under lock and key, kept at his task
Of letting Fenelon know the fool he is.
In a book I promise Christendom next Spring.
Why, if he covets so much meat, the clown,
As a lark's wing next Friday, or, any day,
Diversion beyond catching his own fleas,
He shall be properly swinged, I promise him.
But you, who are so quite another paste
Of a man, — do you obey me? Cultivate
Assiduous, that superior gift you have
Of making madrigals."

THE USE OF ASSYRIA 145
On these terms, he was ordained. He did as he was
told, and lived according to the easy prescription
that was given him. He was such a man, getting
the best of both worlds in charming fashion, when
he was brought into contact with PompiUa and the
depths of life.
Pompilia's experience was of a different sort, first
of mere innocence, and then of black, sodden, un
relieved misery. She seems, first, a child, and then,
a sufferer. But when the worst has come to pass,
and she lies there, knowing that she has but a few
short hours to live, she gains a view of Ufe that would
have been quite impossible at any earlier moment.
Is this the girl who used to have no thought beyond
a ribbon for her hair? Is this the pitiful victim of
Guido's cruel hate ? Who is this man of whom she
speaks? Can it be the ecclesiastical darling of the
world that is discreetly gay, the authority on the
proper manner of mounting fans? She teUs of aU
that happened, in order, although her thoughts are
always on the chUd whom she may never know. Her
life with Guido was a hideous dream, all over now.
"It is the good of dreams, so soon they go."
10

146 PROPHECY AND POETRY
She teUs of Caponsacchi and his coming.
"All day, I sent prayer like incense up
To God the strong, God the beneficent
God ever mindful in all strife and strait,
Who, for our own good, makes the need extreme.
Till at the last He puts forth might and saves."
And then, at the end, she turns away from those who
are about her bed, and caUs upon Caponsacchi as if
they two were alone in the whole world. This is no
weak woman speaking to her lover. This is no
victim going sadly to her death. This is no erring
wife who has sinned, and knows her faidt. But,
from the vantage-ground of one who has but an
hour more to Uve, with the perspective which her
situation gives her, she says what is most worth the
saying. It was Caponsacchi who came to her help,
to his own hindrance. She is chUd no longer. She
knows what men have said and wiU say. But her
words now are not for them, but for Caponsacchi
and for God.
" O lover of my life, O soldier-saint,
No work begun shall ever pause for death.
Love will be helpful to me more and more
F the coming course, the new path I must tread,
My weak hand in thy strong hand, strong for that."

THE USE OF ASSYRIA 147
But let none of those about her misunderstand her
meaning. She knows that he has vows. She would
not caU him from them. Marriage has been to her
a word of evU omen. It has meant cruelty, not love.
"He is a priest;
He cannot marry therefore, which is right;
I think he would not marry if he could.
Marriage on earth seems such a counterfeit,
Mere imitation of the inimitable;
In heaven we have the real and true and sure.
'T is there they neither marry nor are given
In marriage, but are as the angels; right,
Oh how right that is, how like Jesus Christ
To say that. Marriage-making for the earth,
With gold so much, — birth, power, repute so much
Or beauty, youth so much, in lack of these.
Be as the angels rather, who, apart,
Know themselves into one, are found at length
Married, but marry never, no, nor give
In marriage; they are man and wife at once
When the true time is; here we have to wait
Not so long neither. Could we by a wish
Have what we will and get the future now,
Would we wish aught done undone in the past?
So, let him wait God's instant men call years;
Meantime, hold hard by truth and his great sou].

148 PROPHECY AND POETRY
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."
Guido and his crew have disappeared. There is no
thought more of the gaping wounds. EvU has over
reached itseU, and has turned the pleasure-loving
priest into a strong man of God, has made a Madonna
of the tortured girl. It was as when the Assyrian
hosts came up about Jerusalem, and did their worst,
and Isaiah simply refused to take account of them at
aU. They were only for the moment. There were
other things which were more worth thought, "Look
upon Zion, the city of our solemnities; thine eyes
shaU see Jerusalem a quiet habitation, a tabernacle
that shall not be taken down," The turmoU and
confusion through which they were passing only
made its peace and permanence more sure.

CHAPTER VI
THE REMNANT SHALL RETURN
THE conditions of Isaiah's life were such that
evil was always very prominently before
his eyes. As God's servant and God's spokes
man, he was compeUed to hate what God hated
and to condemn what God condemned. He was
a prophet of doom, whose business it was to point
out the close and inevitable connection between
punishment and sin. And so we have his many
words of denunciation, his biting sarcasm, his eager
pleading, his stern rebuke. We have seen how he
discerned the working of God's hand while the
history of his time was in the making, and how he
perceived in the ruthless power of Assyria only a
manifestation, haU concealed and half revealed, of
the greater power of God. With a mighty voice, he
declared that sin meant penalty. After the manner
of his time and class, he gave to one of his sons a
symbolical name which should bear constant witness

150 PROPHECY AND POETRY
to this stern truth. The boy was caUed Maher-
shalal-hash-baz, and the uncouth syUables reminded
aU who spoke his name that there were those who
were hastening to the prey, that they might divide
among themselves the spoU of nations which were in
rebellion against God,
But just as Maher-shalal-hash-baz was not Isaiah's
only chUd, neither was the gloomy doctrine which
his name expressed Isaiah's only thought. Though
men were evil, God remained good. Though men
might turn away from Him, He would receive them
when they came back again. Though the holy city
was fuU of every kind of abomination and iniquity,
it was stiU the city of the Heavenly King, and there
fore there was that in it which could not be destroyed.
The prophet's other son bore witness to this gender
and more inspiring truth. He was caUed Shear
jashub, The Remnant shaU Return; and whUe his
brother's rugged name spoke plainly enough of man's
weakness and the distress that must foUow sin, he
testified that man has in himseU the power of recovery,
and that to God's long-suffering and loving-kindness
there is no end.
These two truths, opposite but not opposing, the

THE REMNANT SHALL RETURN 151
prophet develops side by side. We must remember,
indeed, that it is the nation which is the unit of his
thought. He is an ambassador whose concern is with
the state, not a policeman who must reduce a bois
terous individual to order. He speaks in public, not
in private, terms; and his subject is not personal
salvation, but civic righteousness. With all the
forces of disintegration that are at work, there is
something which wiU check decay, and scatter the
darkness which threatens to overwhelm the land.
"Except the Lord of hosts had left unto us a very
smaU remnant, we should have been as Sodom, and
we should have been like unto Gomorrah." But this
remnant is indestructible. Just as the Lord's hand
is mighty against those who turn away from Him,
so is it mighty eilso to save the Remnant which shaU
return. There is not a section of Isaiah's book in which
there is not at least a suggestion of this comforting
thought. It is the prophet's constant lament that
the remnant wiU be very smaU, " two or three berries
in the top of the uppermost bough, four or five in the
outmost fruitful branches thereof"; but its signifi
cance is out of aU proportion to its size. It marks

152 PROPHECY AND POETRY
the difference between destruction and continuance,
between blank nothingness and the service of the
Lord, A single passage sets forth the far-reaching
consequences of such a doctrine, and shows us the
prophet's thought in all the fulness of its beauty.
" It shaU come to pass in that day that the Lord shall
set His hand again the second time to recover the
remnant of His people which shaU be left, from
Assyria, and from Egypt, and from Pathros, and
from Cush, and from Elam, and from Shinax, and
from Hamath, and from the islands of the sea."
However widely His people may be scattered, they
are not beyond His reach. Whatever the conditions
of their exile, they cannot lose the promise of return.
Moreover, as when Zechariah prophesied, the
restoration of Israel carries with it an assurance of
blessing for all the nations of the world. The out
casts of Israel shall be assembled, and the dispersed
of Judah shaU be gathered together from the four
corners of the earth, but in aU this there is an ensign
for the nations, a raUying place where they too may
come for comfort, and hope, and security, and peace.
The evU of the former time shaU come to an end. It
has worked out its own destruction, and must die a

THE REMNANT SHALL RETURN 153
natural death. "The envy also of Ephraim shall
depart, and the adversaries of Judah shall be cut off ;
Ephraim shaU not envy Judah, and Judah shall not
vex Ephraim," The very face of Nature shaU be
changed, with the passing away of that which was
fit only for destruction, and with the survival of that
which did not require the violence of chastisement
and rebuke. Where there was defeat, there shaU be
victory. Where there was flight, there shaU be con
quest. Where there used to be obstacles to progress,
they may go without interruption and without
hindrance. The prophet measures the triumphant
future by the innocent past. "There shall be an
highway for the remnant of His people, which shaU
be left, from Assyria; like as it was to Israel in the
day that he came up out of the land of Egypt,"
With the view of the sacredness of Jerusalem
which prevailed in Isaiah's day and in the troublous
times which foUowed, it is not surprising that he
should be convinced that the city, however heavily
she must be visited for her sins, was yet too holy to
be destroyed. The Psalter is fiUed with this as
surance. Many of the psalms, of course, are the
expression of personal experience and personal need.

154 PROPHECY AND POETRY
but, whenever Jerusalem is spoken of at aU, it is as
the very resting-place of God, "The hiU of Sion is
a fair place, and the joy of the whole earth ; upon
the north side Ueth the city of the great king; God
is weU known in her palaces as a sure refuge." Be
cause God is in the midst of her, she cannot be
removed. It is out of Sion that God appears in
perfect beauty. It is in Sion that He is praised, it
is Sion where He dweUs, It is the hiU of Sion
which He loves, "Very exceUent things are spoken
of thee, thou city of God," At a later period, this
devotion has increased rather than diminished,
" They that put their trust in the Lord shaU be even
as the mount Sion, which may not be removed, but
standeth fast forever,"
But Isaiah's doctrine of the Remnant, whUe no
doubt it is with Jerusalem that it has its chief con
cern, undergoes a development which we should
hardly have expected. He has said many bitter
things against Assyria and against Egypt, The
meadows by the Nile shaU become dry, and be no
more. There is a spirit of perverseness in the land,
and Egypt has gone astray in every work, as a
drunken man staggers in the way. There is a double

THE REMNANT SHALL RETURN 155
sarcasm in the prophet's word, directed equaUy
against those who put their trust where help cannot
be found, and those who imagine that they are
strong when they are weak, when he declares that
the Egyptians are men, and not God, and their
horses flesh, and not spirit, and that when the Lord
shall stretch out His hand both he that helpeth shall
stumble, and he that is holpen shall fall, and they all
shaU fail together. The Assyrian is in no better case.
He shaU be broken in pieces, and every stroke of
the staff of doom, which the Lord shall lay upon him,
shaU be with tabrets and harps. He shaU flee from
the sword, and his princes shaU become tributary.
His rock shall pass away by reason of terror, and the
princes who have boasted so blatantly shall be dis
mayed. This is the attitude of Isaiah to which we
are accustomed towards these public enemies. But
there is an amazing exception to these threats of
doom, "In that day" — the day of redemption and
deliverance which shall come — "in that day there
shaU be a highway out of Egypt to Assyria, and the
Assyrian shaU come into Egypt, and the Egyptian
into Assyria; and the Egyptians shaU worship with
the Assyrians. In that day shaU Israel be the third

156 PROPHECY AND POETRY
with Egypt and with Assyria, a blessing in the midst
of the earth; for that the Lord of hosts hath blessed
them, saying, Blessed be Egypt my people, and As
syria the work of my hands, and Israel mine inherit
ance," The roads that were once so closely guarded
are open to aU who care to come and go. The one
time enemies are united in a common service. The
nations which had brought the Divine displeasure
upon themselves now know the tenderness of the
Divine love. In the last analysis, it is not because of
God's care for the Holy City, but because there is
something in the very nature of man which is akin
to God HimseU, which makes it inevitable that in
every nation, however far it may have wandered from
the way, there is a Remnant which, some time, some
how, must return to God.
Between the prophet and the poet there is this
great difference, that the one is concerned with
people in the mass, the other with the separate men
and women of his poems. In passing from Isaiah to
Browning, or from any man who deals with the
affairs of state to another man who deals with matters
of the soul, the whole subject must be put on a new
plane. But, aside from this, we find in the modern

THE REMNANT SHALL RETURN 157
English poet all that the ancient Hebrew prophet
has set forth. He comes to it under many figures,
and from many points of view. Just as Isaiah's
vision of restoration included not only Israel, to
which he belonged, but Egypt and Assyria, which
were aUen even when they were not hostile, so
Browning's corresponding thought has the very
widest range. Perhaps there is no subject which
better iUustrates that universaUty of his which we
have already noticed. In the most forlorn specimen
he can find something which belies the forlornness,
and which gives at least a suggestion of better things.
It is not only of the redemption from actual sin of
which be speaks. In the midst of vulgarity there is
something which makes for refinement, in supersti
tion and incredulity, the believing too much and the
believing too little, faith and reason are not utterly
destroyed. This is no smaU part of the thesis of
"Christmas Eve." Driven by stress of weather,
the poet takes refuge in a wretched little chapel in
the middle of a yet more wretched common, to which
there comes a congregation most wretched of all.
It is the very apotheosis of everything that would
offend good taste.

158 PROPHECY AND POETRY
"In came the flock; the fat weary woman,
Panting and bewildered, down-clapping
Her umbrella with a mighty report.
Grounded it by me, wry and flapping,
A wreck of whalebones; then, with a snort.
Like a startied horse, at the interloper,
(Who humbly knew himself improper,
But could not shrink up small enough) —
Round to the door, and in — the gruff
Hinge's invariable scold
Making my very blood run cold."
She was foUowed by a " many- tattered little old-
faced peaking sister-turned-mother," with a dirty-
faced baby to take care of. Then there came a
female something in dirty satins, "all that was left
of a woman once," There was a man with a wen,
none of whose misery is left to the imagination.
But the congregation was nothing to the sermon, and
the manner in which the sermon was received.
"The hot smell and the human noises,
And my neighbor's coat, the greasy cuff of it,
Were a pebble-stone that a child's hand poises.
Compared with the pig-of-lead-like pressure
Of the preaching-man's immense stupidity.
As he poured his doctrine forth, full measure.
To meet his audience's avidity.

THE REMNANT SHALL RETURN 159
No sooner got our friend an inkling
Of treasure hid in the Holy Bible,
Than he handled it so, in fine irreverence.
As to hug the book of books to pieces;
And, a patchwork of chapters and texts in severance,
Not improved by the private dog's ears and creases,
Having clothed his own soul with, he'd fain see equipt
yours —
So tossed you again your Holy Scriptures.
And you picked them up in a sense, no doubt;
Nay, had but a single face of my neighbors
Appeared to suspect that the preacher's labors
^yere help which the world could be saved without,
'T is odds but I might have borne in quiet
A qualm or two at my spiritual diet.
Or (who can tell?) perchance even mustered
Somewhat to urge in behalf of the sermon;
But the flock sat on, divinely flustered,
Sniffing, methought, its dew of Hermon
With such content in every snuffle
As the devil inside us loves to ruffle.
My old fat woman purred with pleasure,
And thumb round thumb went twirling faster,
While she, to his periods keeping measure,
Maternally devoured the pastor."
It was too much. The poet's gorge rose at the adora
tion of the absurd, the muddling of truth with
contented ignorance.

i6o PROPHECY AND POETRY
"I flung out of the little chapel."
As he went, there came to him thoughts and
visions. He had seen God's power in the immensity
of the heavens, but he had felt God's love in his
heart, the mightier of the two.
"The loving worm within its clod
Were diviner than a loveless god
Amid his worlds, I will dare to say."
As he thought thus of God's love, suddenly —
"All at once I looked up with terror.
He was there.
He Himself with His human air.
On the narrow pathway, just before.
I saw the back of Him, no more —
He had left the chapel, then, as I.
I forgot all about the sky.
No face; only the sight
Of a sweepy garment, vast and white,
With a hem that I could recognize.
I felt terror, no surprise;
My mind filled with the cataract
At one bound of the mighty fact.
I remember, He did say.
Doubtless, that to this world's end,
Where two or three should meet and pray.

THE REMNANT SHALL RETURN i6i
He would be in the midst, their friend;
Certainly He was there with them!"
"He disdains not His own thirst to slake
At the poorest love was ever offered."
Though He had left the chapel, it was not, Uke the
poet, through disgust at the burlesque uncouthness
of the worship that was rendered there. Rather, it
was because there were other regions which He must
visit, other places which He must bless. WhUe the
poet stUl clings to the hem of the Divine garment,
they come to Rome, and stand before St. Peter's
at some high festival.
"Her teaching is not so obscured
By errors and perversities,
That no truth shines athwart the lies;
And He, whose eye detects a spark
Even where, to man's, the whole seems dark,
May well see flame where each beholder
Acknowledges the embers smoulder."
But presently, there is something more than this calm
tolerance; there is fellowship.
"Do these men praise Him? I will raise
My voice up to their point of praise !
I see the error, but above
The scope of error, see the love."

1 62 PROPHECY AND POETRY
And at the last, there is a point of view which can
arouse enthusiasm even over an asceticism which
might weU enough have seemed useless, or worse.
There are those who have turned their backs upon
much of the glory, the beauty, the wonder, the
majesty, of the world. They need not to have done
so. They ought not to have done so. Do not say that
until you know why they have given up what is so
good. It was not through indifference or contempt,
but "All these loves, late struggling incessant,
When faith has at last united and bound them,
They offer up to God for a present."
There can be no blame for such an act as that, but
the reverse.
"Why, I will, on the whole, be rather proud of it, —
And, only taking the act in reference
To the other recipients who might have allowed of it,
I will rejoice that God had the preference."
It is the same, again, when they come to the
German professor, "three parts subUme to one
grotesque." He has robbed Christianity of all that
makes it what it is, but he sees the Divine beauty
even whUe he speaks of the myth of Christ. The

THE REMNANT SHALL RETURN 163
vision does not turn away, and the poet would con
clude with a panegyric upon tolerance —
"A value for religion's self,
A carelessness about the sects of it.
Let me enjoy my own conviction,
Not watch my neighbor's faith with fretfulness,
Still spying there some dereliction
Of truth, perversity, forgetfulness !
Better a mild indifferentism — "
But there is something wholly inadequate in such a
termination, and taken by itseU it would be Uttle
more than a misleading parody. The lazy glow of
benevolence towards the beliefs of another cannot
take the place of one's own belief. Though Brown
ing has but Uttle to say of Christ — he speaks of
men, not of God — He is yet for him the Light of
every man that cometh into the world. This is the
meaning of that catholicity of interest, that insistence
upon the worth of the most worthless man, from
which there is no escaping in his work. But for the
very reason that He is the light of every man, we can
not see by another's Ught. We must have our own.
The soul which built for itself the palace of art held
no form of creed, but contemplated aU. Its tolerance,
founded upon a narrow satisfaction with itseU

i64 PROPHECY AND POETRY
rather than upon any breadth of sympathy with
others, contributed to its undoing. Men were put
into the world to act, not to look on. Tolerance is
no doubt a part, — only a part — of man's duty
towards his neighbor; but his duty towards God
remains. And so the poem is not yet ended.
"Needs must there be one way, our chief
Best way of worship ; let me strive
To find it, and when found, contrive
My fellows also take their share !
This constitutes my earthly care;
God's is above it and distinct.
For I, a man, with men am linked,
And not a brute with brutes; no gain
That I experience, must remain
Unshared; but should my best endeavor
To share it, fail — subsisteth ever
God's care above, and I exult
That God, by God's own ways occult.
May — doth, I will believe — bring back
All wanderers to a single track.
Meantime, I can but testify
God's care for me — no more can I —
It is but for myself I know."
And the last word of all is a reminder that practice is
better than precept. The vision was a dream. The

THE REMNANT SHALL RETURN 165
little chapel where the poet was betrayed into un
timely sleep has lost none of its meanness and
uncouthness. The preacher speaks through his nose.
His gesture is too emphatic. Unlike St, Paul, but
like too many of his kind, alas! he fights as one
that beateth the air. Beside what's pedagogic, his
subject-matter itself lacks logic. His EngUsh is
ungrammatic. In pastor and people, there is every
thing that is offensive and absurd. But muddy
water is better than none at aU, and treasure held in
earthen vessels is treasure stiU. The poet has learned
his lesson. He must be himseU, but he can adapt
himseU to conditions as he finds them. Because
things are not at aU as he would choose to have them,
he may not dismiss them with sweeping condemna
tion, there is no excuse for him to stand aloof. Nor
does he.
"May truth shine out, stand ever before us!
I put up pencil and join chorus
To Hephzibah Tune, without further apology,
The last five verses of the third section
Of the seventeenth hymn of Whitfield's Collection,
To conclude with the Doxology."
It may be felt that in a poem like this, although it
shows us "remnants" of one sort and another,

i66 PROPHECY AND POETRY
rescued from catastrophes of vulgarity, of wholesale
credulousness and general unbelief, the subject is
treated very largely from an academic point of view.
AUowing for all the difference that there must be
between a question of national existence and a
question of individual salvation, this truth at the root
of error, this soul of goodness in things evU, is not
quite the remnant which Isaiah describes as turning
back to God out of its wrong-doing and its sin. But
as the doctrine develops under Browning's hand, we
shaU see that he covers aU of Isaiah's ground,
although his mountain summit is reached by a
much more gradual ascent, and therefore requires a
much larger surface. In his own sphere, what Isaiah
teaches as positive truth and with the authority of
the prophetic order. Browning teaches too; and he
teaches it with an assurance which is far stronger
than any pious hope. Meanwhile, there are a hun
dred suggestions of the thought, and approximations
to it, many of them, after Browning's manner,
brought in as mere parentheses and asides to some
thing else. There are these verses from "Cristina,"
in which he speaks of the depths that may be found
in the soul of any man, and the clearness of vision
which may come when it is least expected

THE REMNANT SHALL RETURN 167
"Oh we're sunk enough here, God knows!
But not quite so sunk that moments,
Sure though seldom, are denied us.
When the spirit's true endowments
Stand out plainly from its false ones,
And apprize it if pursuing
Or the right way or the wrong way,
To its triumph or undoing.
"There are flashes struck from midnights,
There are fire-flames noondays kindle,
Whereby piled-up honors perish.
Whereby swollen ambitions dwindle,
While just this or that poor impulse
Which for once had play unstifled
Seems the sole work of a life time,
That away the rest have trifled."
There is the forlorn hope of which "The Last Ride
Together" speaks. The barest chance that aU may
not be lost is enough to set the pulses tingling. It is
a story of hopeless love.
"All, my life seemed meant for, fails."
There is nothing to look forward to but separation
and vain regret. But may there not be one last
ride before the parting comes? So, at any rate,
one day more is snatched from the duU round of

i68 PROPHECY AND POETRY
misery which looms ahead. And who can teU what
may happen ?
"Who knows but the world may end to-night?"
Sometimes we come upon Browning's thought of
the remnant, gained of course by a very different
road from that along which Isaiah travels, as he
points out for us how closely good and bad are inter
mingled in this world. For him, there can be none
of that easy separation between sheep and goats
which has been the pride of prigs and the restless
desire of semi-theologians.
"Best people are not angels quite;
While not the worst of people's doings scare
The devil."
In his description of Pietro and Violante, he gives
a commentary upon what we may accept as the
average of mankind. "Foul and fair.
Sadly-mixed natures; self-indulgent, yet
Self-sacrificing too; how the love soars,
How the craft, avarice, vanity, and spite
Sink again I So they keep the middle course,
Slide into silly crime at unaware.
Slip back into the stupid virtue, stay
Nowhere enough for being classed."

THE REMNANT SHALL RETURN 169
Uncomplimentary as this account is, stupid and
commonplace and unintentional as their virtue may
be, stUl there is virtue there. And there is virtue
to be found in every man and woman of whom
Browning writes; nay, there is more than virtue,
unless we think of virtue as something which cannot
be overborne, which is certain of ultimate victory,
however long and hard may be the struggle. In
"Fifine at the Fair," a weak man speaks strong
words, "Partake my confidence! No creature's made so mean
But that, some way, it boasts, could we investigate,
Its supreme worth; fulfils, by ordinance of fate,
Its momentary task, gets glory all its own,
Tastes triumph in the world, pre-eminent, alone."
And so, in Browning's characters, there is always
this possibiUty of something better, which comes
when we do not look for it, but which cannot be
lost sight of nor denied. He paints the common
interests of Ufe in reds and blues, but he is by no
means chary of laying on the black. In the produc
tion of viUains, there are very few poets who are
his equal. But, in the very "absolutest drench of
dark," we are made to feel that the last word has

170 PROPHECY AND POETRY
not been said. Ldonce de Miranda, the hero of
"Red Cotton Nightcap Country," was weak and
seU-centred all his life; the word hero can be ap
pUed to such a man only in the strictest literary
sense; but, at the moment of his death, he revealed
a strength of which there had been no glimpse be
fore. Mr. Sludge the Medium was a knave, a coward,
and a fool, turning men's tenderest feelings into mer
chandise, and caring for nothing except the cash
which he caUs "God's sole solid in this world."
He was caught out in his deception, and confessed
because there was nothing else for him to do. He
stands a seU-admitted fraud. But he cannot end
his story so.
"You 've heard what I confess; I don't unsay
A single word; I cheated when I could,
Rapped with my toe-joints, set sham hands at work.
Wrote down names weak in S3mipathetic ink,
Rubbed odic lights with ends of phosphor match.
And all the rest; believe that; believe this.
By the same token, though it seems to set
The crooked straight again, unsay the said,
Stick up what I've thrown down; I can't help that,
It's truth! I somehow vomit truth to-day.
This trade of mine — I don't know, can't be sure,
But there was something in it, tricks and all!"

THE REMNANT SHALL RETURN 171
It is not an apology which could rehabiUtate a
scoundrel as an honest man ; but as he goes on with
a long discussion of those presentiments and pre
monitions which may mean so little or so much, we
are made to realize that he is trying to excuse him
self to himseU, and that the man who has deliberately
chosen lying as a profession yet has reverence for
truth. Of Browning's viUains, no doubt Guido Frances
chini is the chief. He is in the class with lago or
with the Shakespeare version of King Richard III.,
except that their crimes were on a larger scale than
his, and therefore seem a little more worth while.
We have seen something of his prostitution of every
noble quality that man could possess, of the hideous
travesty upon his kind that he presents with his
hypocrisy, his cringing cowardice, his brutal buUy-
ing force. But when the Pope comes to weigh the
case, whUe there is nothing that he can say for Guido,
there is yet this hope of a Divine spark which may
be lurking somewhere, and which, somehow or
other, may be brought to Ught. Mercy would be
a mockery, a mistaken kindness that could only
plunge the wretch into deeper damnation. The

172 PROPHECY AND POETRY
only leniency that man could show was to insist
upon immediate and condign punishment. But
after man has spared not, it may be that God can
help, that Guido wiU be saved in his own despite.
Even whUe the Pope signs the order for execution,
with the old prophetic flinging of himseU on God
he looks for that remnant of the soul which may
not be cut off from God forever.
"I have no hope
Except in such a suddenness of fate.
I stood at Naples once, a night so dark
I could have scarce conjectured there was earth
Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all ;
But the night's black was burst through by a blaze —
Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore,
Through her whole length of mountain visible;
There lay the city thick and plain with spires
And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea.
So may the truth be flashed out by one blow,
And Guido see, one instant, and be saved.
Else I avert my face, nor follow him
Into that sad obscure sequestered state
Where God unmakes but to remake the soul
He else made first in vain; which must not be!"
The necessity is made to lie in the heart of God
rather than in the wiU of man.

THE REMNANT SHALL RETURN 173
There are many other iUustrations which might be
given, bearing more or less closely upon this theme,
but enough has been said to show that poet and
prophet, so far as this subject is concerned, move
largely along parallel lines of thought. Browning
sums up the whole matter when he speaks in his
own person of the threatened destruction of the Paris
Morgue. He tells us how he entered the little
building which, perched where the waters of the
Seine divide to form the island, seems almost to be
waiting for its prey. There, enthroned each on his
copper couch, lay the three men who, yesterday, of
aU the men in Paris, had most abhorred their Uves,
and so had kiUed themselves.
"Poor men, God made, and all for that!
The reverence struck me; o'er each head
Religiously was hung its hat,
Each coat dripped by the owner's bed,
Sacred from touch; each had his berth,
His bounds, his proper place of rest,
Who last night tenanted on earth
Some arch, where twelve such slept abreast, —
Unless the plain asphalte seemed best."
They had met violent death; no doubt they had
Uved violent and ungoverned Uves. This one, per-

174 PROPHECY AND POETRY
haps, had coveted what was far beyond his reach,
and could stand no longer the thought of his own
inconsequence and helplessness. This one had
hated his kind so bitterly that the hatred came at
last to include himseU. This one had let his lower
nature take the reins, and could not bear it when
he came to grief. There was a moral to it all, of
course, but with the moral, which he who ran might
read, there was a confidence which nothing could
dispel. "It's wiser being good than bad;
It's safer being meek than fierce*
It's fitter being sane than mad.
My own hope is, a sun will pierce
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched;
That, after last, returns the first.
Though a wide compass round be fetched;
That what began best, can't end worst,
Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst."
The remnant shaU return. Neither Isaiah nor
Browning were men who were disposed to regard
evU lightly. The heresies and inteUectual dis
orders of our own day, which turn evU into a cheap
jest or a trifling haUucination, were not yet bom;

THE REMNANT SHALL RETURN 175
but we may be sure that they would have had Uttle
sympathy either from poet or prophet. Their as
surance came to them, not because they belittled
evil, but because they made much of God, In the
nation's darkest hour, Isaiah was certain that God's
city could not perish, but must remain to be a bless
ing to aU nations of the earth. When the wreck of
the soul was threatened. Browning was certain that
for man made in God's image there must be a
power of recovery, even though it might be beyond
the sight of human eyes.

CHAPTER VII
THE MEANING OF THE FUTURE
THE future is a court to which the most
desperate case can always be appealed.
So far as the past is concerned, there is no
more to say. What I have written, I have written.
There is neither room for hope, nor place for im
agination. But in the future, everything is to be
made. Its very formlessness gives it a fascination
that is all its own. If there is need of remedy, it is
in the future that the remedy may be sought and
found. If present wrong-doing must bring punish
ment, it is in the future that the punishment wiU be
inflicted. If there are rewards for bravery and
zeal and patience, it is in the future that the dis
tribution wiU be made. In every rehgion it has
played a prominent part. The Mohammedan has
his Paradise of sensuous deUghts, the North Ameri
can Indian looked forward to his happy hunting-
grounds, even the cultivated pagan may long for
the "sleep eternal in an eternal night " which shaU
bring to an end the selfishness and ennui of his duU
176

THE MEANING OF THE FUTURE 177
existence. If Ufe has taken away from him aU
other pleasures, it yet affords him a convenient
opportunity for contemplating the joys of vacuous-
ness, which can be tasted only in anticipation.
In Christianity, the importance of the future has
been most strongly marked, so strongly marked,
indeed, that there have been systems of theology in
which very Uttle room has been left for anything
else. Heaven and hell have fiUed the canvas so
completely, with heU predominating, as requiring
more glaring colors, that men have lost sight of the
fact that God so loved the world that He sent His
Son into the world to take our nature upon Him,
to wear the form of a servant, to be found in fashion
as a man, and to teach men by His example, not
how to behave in heU or heaven, but how to Uve on
earth. There can be no adequate conception of
Christianity which does not realize that the Word
was made flesh, and dwelt among us on this earth
of ours, that Jesus Christ was not ashamed to call
men His brethren, not as they might be in some
future state, but as they were, with all the hindrances
and Umitations of the world upon them; that He
knows from His own experience, not indeed the

178 PROPHECY AND POETRY
sin, but the temptations of our mortal nature which
lead to sin in those less strong than He, Chris
tianity, whatever it may have been Yesterday, or
whatever of promise or of warning it may offer for
To-morrow, speaks always its word of greatest
power to To-day. It is a Life to lead, a Friend to
welcome, a Guide to foUow, a Master to accept.
But, when all this is clearly understood, it yet re
mains that Christianity has a firm grasp upon the
future. Because it is concerned with life, it cannot
be Umited to three-score years and ten, or four
score years. Because it is concerned with char
acter, its continuance cannot be dependent upon
the changes and chances which belong to earth.
Because it is concerned with love, it knows no end.
We read of Christ HimseU that for the joy that was
set before Him He endured the cross, despising the
shame. He speaks to the disciples of the many
mansions in His Father's house, and of the heavenly
places which He must prepare for those who have
been close to Him on earth. He has much to say
of stewardship, and accounting, and responsibility.
When, on the third day, He rises from the dead;
when, a few weeks later. He goes with the disciples

THE MEANING OF THE FUTURE 179
as far as Bethany, and while He yet blesses them
is parted from them, and returns again to the heaven
from whence He came; He opens up before men's
eyes such vistas as they could never have imagined.
He shows them that Ufe is too great a gift to end in
death. But this was seven hundred years and more after
Isaiah's time. The Hebrew prophets could only
gaze into the future in dim anticipation of one who
should come some day to save his people, to solve
their problems and to free them from their bonds.
The wisest of them could have no such conception of
personal immortality as is a commonplace in Chris
tian days. In the story of Hezekiah's sickness, we
may see how the men of that time felt regarding
death. Not only did it mean the destruction of
earthly hopes, but it was the blotting out of every
thing which made men what they were. It took
from them aU stoutness of heart, it opened up be
fore them a yawning chasm into which they were
compeUed to plunge, it separated them irremediably
from God Himself. " The grave cannot praise Thee,
death cannot celebrate Thee; they that go down
into the pit cannot hope for Thy truth," It is true

i8o PROPHECY AND POETRY
that we have the prophetic saying, foreshadowing
the New Testament and repeated there, that God
wiU swallow up death in victory, and that He wiU
wipe away tears from off aU faces; but as we read
on we find that this is associated with taking away
the rebuke of His people from the earth, and we
realize that it is a promise to those who shaU belong
to the nation in the day of its redemption rather
than to those who are now struggling with their
sins while the nation turns its back on God, There
is no subject in the treatment of which the prophet
brings out more plainly that civic righteousness, not
personal need, is always his chief concern.
For Isaiah, then, there could have been no such
conception of the future as came, some centuries
later, to St, Paul, Whatever his understanding of
the Messiah may have been, the Messiah's work was
to be done on earth, and did not extend to heaven.
If Isaiah could have heard St. Paul's words about
the Resurrection, they would have had no meaning
for him. " If Christ be not risen, then is our preach
ing vain, and your faith is also vain. If in this lUe
only we have hope in Christ, we are of aU men most
miserable." To the Corinthians of St. Paul's day,

THE MEANING OF THE FUTURE

I8I

this language was plain enough; but for Isaiah to
have used it would have involved an entire recon
struction of his thought. He was a man of God, a
man of the widest vision and the deepest faith. He
looked for the Messiah, who should come to bring
God's work to a successful issue. But that work
was for the nation, and nations do not go to heaven.
Isaiah's future contains no such pictures as those
which the Book of Revelation sets before us. He
sees things which shaU be hereafter, but there is no
door opened that he may look into heaven — that
happens only when he first goes about his work;
his heavenly vision is for the task before him, not
for some Ufe to come. For him the future is fflled,
not with songs of praise and thanksgiving to God
in heaven, but with national triumph, with national
redemption, with national vindication of God's
sovereignty on earth.
The prophet looks to these coming years with no
less assurance than St. Paul looks forward to the
resurrection of the dead. God's place in them is
just as inevitable as it is with St. Paul, when the end
shaU have come, and aU things shaU be in subjec
tion under His feet. There is the same theatre, but

i82 PROPHECY AND POETRY
a new interpretation has been given to lUe. We
have seen how the sins of his people lay heavily
upon the prophet's heart and conscience, how loudly
he repeated his threats of the punishment that must
surely foUow, how eagerly he insisted upon a rem
nant which should justify God's ancient choice of
this people for His own. When the present has the
very least to offer, Isaiah sees in the future God's
opportunity and God's right. From the year when
King Uzziah died, from the day when there came
to him the dazzling vision of God's work and of
God's need, God has been always at the centre of
his thought. If the misdoings of his people have
compeUed him now and again to turn from God's
splendor to man's weakness, it has been of hard
necessity, and not of choice. But the future is an
open page, unstained as yet. Though God must
surely punish for man's sin, just as surely would He
have man turn from his wickedness, and live. And
so the future upon which Isaiah loves to dweU is not
the day of reckoning, though that must have its
place, but the day of recognition and return; the
day when men shaU know the purpose of their life,
and the dignity of their calling, and the closeness of
their fellowship with God.

THE MEANING OF THE FUTURE 183
From the beginning of Isaiah's prophesying to
the end, this note is always sounding. "Though
your sins be as scarlet, they shaU be as white as
snow ; though they be red like crimson, they shaU be
as wool." Here we have the fact of the present, and
the possibility of the future, brought into sharpest
contrast and set side by side. However dismal the
state of affairs may be which prevaUs in Jerusalem,
the time shaU come when it shaU be caUed The city
of righteousness. The faithful city, and when it shall
deserve the name. The nations shall come to it,
that they may learn the ways of quietness and peace.
It shaU stand as a tabernacle for a shadow in the
daytime from the heat, and for a place of refuge, and
for a covert from storm and from rain. This glorious
future is so real to the prophet that, with something
perhaps of the confusion of Hebrew tenses, but with
even more of the tendency of human nature to make
one's own what is eagerly desired, he can speak of
it as if it had already come. The people that walked
in darkness "have seen" a great Ught, though it has
not yet shined upon them; but Isaiah projects him
self into the future and looks back, and so describes
what he is sure must happen as if it were already

184 PROPHECY AND POETRY
come to pass. The spirit of peace extends even to
the brute creation. The woU and the lamb, the
leopard and the kid, the calf and the young lion,
forget their ancient enmity, and dweU together. On
the one side there is no more ferocity, on the other
side there is no more fear. The knowledge of the
Lord wiU drive strife and discord and contention
from the earth.
So fuU of promise is the future for those who can
realize that it belongs to God, and who are content
to leave it in His hands. It needs no new environ
ment, for it fiUs the old environment with a new
glory. "Though the Lord give you the bread of
adversity, and the water of affliction, yet shaU not
thy teachers be removed into a corner any more,
but thine eyes shall see thy teachers ; and thine ears
shaU hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the
way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand,
and when ye turn to the left," For ignorance there
shall be knowledge, for darkness there shall be Ught.
"The Ught of the moon shall be as the light of the
sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as
the Ught of seven days, in the day that the Lord
bindeth up the breach of His people, and healeth

THE MEANING OF THE FUTURE 185
the stroke of their wound." Even where punish
ment cannot be averted, there is a clear recognition
by the prophet that it cannot be the final goal which
God would reach. He has been speaking, with even
more than his usual vehemence, of the certainty of
the destruction that must come upon persistent sin.
He holds up as it were a mirror before the people of
Jerusalem, and bids them look to the crown of
pride, the drunkards of Ephraim, and there see their
own selfishness and their own danger. The beauty
of the valley shaU be a fading flower, and as the
hasty fruit that dries and withers under the summer
sun; but it is impossible that this was the purpose
for which it was created. Close upon his words of
threatening and rebuke, Isaiah speaks a parable.
Why does the ploughman plough all day but that
he may be able, in good time, to sow his seed ? Why
does he break the clods of earth upon his ground
but that the seed may have a chance to germinate?
He threshes the ripe grain, but he is not always
threshing. The chaff must be separated from the
wheat, but when that has been accompUshed there
is an end of such rough measures. And this is but
a figure of the way in which God works. What-

i86 PROPHECY AND POETRY
ever may have happened in the past, God gives
men the future that they may fiU it with divine per
formance, and give it back to Him. "The ransomed
of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with songs
and everlasting joy upon their heads; they shall
obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing
shaU flee away." It may be that these words come
from a later time than that in which Isaiah lived,
but at any rate they are fiUed with Isaiah's spirit.
They show us what was his vision of the future,
and give us his conception of its meaning.
The vision which came to Browning was very
much of the same sort. Because he was a poet and
not a prophet, because he was an EngUshman and
not a Hebrew, because, instead of looking forward
to the Messiah, he could look back to Christ, there
was of course a divergence from Isaiah in his under
standing of the things for which the future stood.
For him, it was not an opportunity for God's chosen
people to enter into their inheritance upon the earth,
but it was an opportunity for men and women to
complete their development under new conditions,
and with fuUer Ught, whether in earth or heaven.
With Browning, as with Isaiah, there is not much

THE MEANING OF THE FUTURE 187
thought of the future as a time when punishment
must be inflicted for evil that has been done. This
is an aspect of it which is not denied, but which is
taken for granted and dismissed without further
notice, as something which does not require argu
ment nor explanation. For the unjust to recognize
the hatefulness of his injustice, for the filthy to
realize that he is waUowing in filth, there must be
something more than the mere lapse of time. Though
century were to be piled on century, and aeon upon
aeon, it would not be enough to awaken the sinner
to his sin, much less to convince him of his fault.
There must be something else for that, and some
thing which lies beyond man's power. As the Pope
considers Guido's case, Guido's brother, the Abbot
Paul, comes within his range of view. This is not
the man upon whom he is called to sit in judgment.
There are not many things to say about him, but it
is not often that so much has been said in such short
compass. "This fox-faced horrible priest, this brother-brute
The Abate, — why, mere wolfishness looks well,
Guido stands honest in the red o' the flame,
Beside this yellow that would pass for white,

i88 PROPHECY AND POETRY
Twice Guido, all craft but no violence,
This copier of the mien and gait and garb
Of Peter and Paul, that he may go disguised,
Rob halt and lame, sick folk i' the temple-porch !
Armed with religion, fortified by law,
A man of peace, who trims the midnight lamp
And turns the classic page — and all for craft,
All to work harm with, yet incur no scratch !
While Guido brings the struggle to a close,
Paul steps back the due distance, clear o' the trap
He builds and baits. Guido I catch and judge;
Paul is past reach in this world and my time:
That is a case reserved."
There are many times when it seems as if the Pope,
while he speaks foi himself on the matter which is
immediately before him, were speaking for Browning,
too, on the whole subject which the special case sug
gests. Here, at any rate, he shows that there are
questions regarding the future which Ue beyond his
province and the poet's; and he marks out the
limitations within which we must expect the subject
to be treated.
And indeed, with Browning, the future always
stands for hope, and cheer, and promise. It gives
him a free field for that invincible optimism of his,

THE MEANING OF THE FUTURE 189
which might come to grief if it were compeUed to
look too uninterruptedly at the shame and evU of
this present world. The last calamity that could be
associated with it would be that it should be forever
fixed and changeless. In one of his latest poems, he
teUs the story of a native of the star Rephan, where
all things are forever at their best. There was no
want there; for whatever should be, they already
have. There was no growth nor change, for where
perfection is found made to order growth must be
superfluous, and change could only mean deteriora
tion. There was nothing worse nor better; in that
uniform universe there could be no standards of
comparison of any sort.
"Can your world's phrase, your sense of things
Forth-figure the Star of my God? No springs,
No winters throughout its space. Time brings
"No hope, no fear; as to-day shall be
To-morrow ; advance or retreat need we
At our stand-still through eternity?
"All happy: needs must we so have been,
Since who could be otherwise? All serene.
What dark was to banish, what light to screen?"

190 PROPHECY AND POETRY
The man from Rephan, who has come to earth,
looks into the faces of those to whom he teUs his tale.
They are worn and weak and furrowed, some with
the weight of years, and some old before their time
with care and worry. They are diseased in body,
and sick in soul, and pinched by poverty, or satiated
with wealth. But he has chosen to cast in his lot
with theirs. That faultless exactness of Rephan has
palled upon him. That endless repetition of per
fection must kiU aU feUowship, and sympathy, and
aspiration. Somehow — he thinks it could only
be from God HimseU — his soul's quietude awak
ened into discontent. There must be something
more for him than this merging in a neutral best of
weak and strong, and right and wrong, and wise and
foolish. It is not sameness that he wants, but differ
ence. His own smug perfectness is tawdry and
second-rate. There must be an Infinite above and
below him to attract his flight and to repel his
falling. "Enough: for you doubt, you hope, O men.
You fear, you agonize, die: what then?
Is an end to your life's work out of ken?

THE MEANING OF THE FUTURE 191
"Have you no assurance that, earth at end.
Wrong will prove right? Who made shall mend
In the higher sphere to which yearnings tend?
"Why should I speak? You divine the test.
When the trouble grew in my pregnant breast,
A voice said, 'So would'st thou strive, not rest?
"'Burn and not smoulder, win by worth,
Not rest content with a wealth that's dearth?
Thou art past Rephan, thy place be earth!'"
Rephan stood, not for attainment, for there can be
no attainment where there has been no effort, nor
for fulfilment, for there was nothing unfinished to
fulffl, but for repletion, and the absence of oppor
tunity, and the blotting out of any future. But it
is the possibiUty of renewal, and recovery, and ac-
compUshment, and triumph, that the future offers,
which, makes the silver lining to earth's darkest
cloud. A future which is so fuU of significance must have
room. It must reach on where men's eyes cannot
foUow, and it must suggest what men's imaginations
cannot picture. Cleon, the pagan poet, recognizes
this, even while he dismisses Paul and Christ with a

192 PROPHECY AND POETRY
contemptuous sneer, as those whose doctrine could be
held by no sane man. But the lust of Uving grows
in him as he contemplates the certainty of death.
The time has come when he must give things up,
but even as he is forced to give them up he finds
he wants them more than ever,
"Every day my sense of joy
Grows more acute, my soul (intensified
By power and insight) more enlarged, more keen:
While every day my hairs fall more and more.
My hand shakes, and the heavy years increase."
It is an anti-cUmax to which he cannot reconcUe
himseU, that as he gains in knowledge he must lose
the power of enjoyment, and that he, who is now a
thuaking, feeling, acting man, must be separated
from the vigor and reaUty of life, and sleep in an
urn. The thought is an intolerable one.
"It is so horrible,
I dare at times imagine to my need
Some future state revealed to us by 2^us,
Unlimited in capability
For joy, as this is in desire for joy,
— To seek which, the joy-hunger forces us."

THE MEANING OF THE FUTURE 193
His heathen philosophy affords no ground for his
imagination, so, most reluctantly, he dismisses it as
something which cannot be. But his very yearning
for it shows how closely the thought of the future
touches the soul of man.
What, to Cleon, could be no more than a shadowy
and unsubstantial dream, takes shape with Paracel
sus, in another age and under new conditions. To
the German student, as to the Greek poet, there
comes a passion for the richness and fulness of life
which cannot be satisfied with renunciation. There
was a time when Einsiedeln and its green hiUs were
aU the world to him. That time goes by, and he
sets out upon his quest for knowledge. What was
a speck expands into a star. Life is an adventure,
a search, a progress. But at the beginning, Para
celsus can forecast the end,
"I go to prove my soul !
I see my way as birds their trackless way.
I shall arrive ! what time, what circuit first,
I ask not ; but unless God send His hail
Or blinding fireballs, sleet or stifling snow, '"'"
In some time. His good time, I shall arrive:
He guides me and the bird. In His good time!"
13

194 PROPHECY AND POETRY
This faith of his gives him patience, and strength,
and courage. It carries him through failure, and
the kind of failure which comes from within, and
breaks the heart, as weU as that which comes from
without, and only tries the temper. It helps him to
an understanding of the world, and to a recognition
of his own insufficiency and incompleteness. It is
man who is the consummation of God's scheme of
being, the heir of hopes too fair to turn out false,
and in whom, when he is known as man, there be
gins anew a tendency to God. And at the end Para
celsus, though he takes into full account aU in which
he has fallen short on earth, can stiU trust the
future. "If I stoop
Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud.
It is but for a time; I press God's lamp
Close to my breast ; its splendor, soon or late.
Will pierce the gloom; I shall emerge one day."
If he succeeds, there is so much stiU to do that the
consciousness of success can never make him idle;
and if he faUs, the consciousness of faUure is power
less to rob him of his hope.
It is just because the future means so much to

THE MEANING OF THE FUTURE 195
Browning that he so often carries it over into another
world. This world, as it seemed to Cleon, is too
smaU. And about that other world there is a solem
nity and dignity that is aU its own, apart from what
ever terms on which one enters. A man has died
on the field of honor, shot for a deed of dishonor that
he has done. A moment ago, he was an offence to
earth — but now :
"How he lies in his rights of a man!
Death has done all death can.
And, absorbed in the new life he leads,
He recks not, he heeds
Nor his wrong nor my vengeance ; both strike
On his senses alike,
And are lost in the solemn and strange
Surprise of the change."
The bearing of the penalty is the first step toward
better things, and the new Ufe may help to remedy
the old. In a very different way, "Evelyn Hope"
suggests the power of that new Ufe in clearing up
what this Ufe was not able to reveal.
"Sixteen years old when she died!
Perhaps she had scarcely heard my name;
It was not her time to love; beside,
Her life had many a hope and aim,

196 PROPHECY AND POETRY
Duties enough and little cares,
And now was quiet, now astir.
Till God's hand beckoned unawares, —
And the sweet white brow is all of her."
But the man who had loved her, and never told his
love, could not beUeve that all was over before it
was begun. It might be that there was much to
learn, much to forget, before his time should come,
but that it must come some day he was certain. And
he trusts the future, though the present is fuU of
obscurity and doubt.
"So, hush — I will give you this leaf to keep;
See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand.
There, that is our secret : go to sleep !
You will wake, and remember, and understand."
The future is so fuU of possibiUty and power that
it imparts to the present something of its own sig
nificance. What leads to so much must be itself
worth whUe. The poet looks at the old pictures in
Florence and wonders at their beauty. He com
pares 'the Greek statues which he sees about him
with the men and women of his acquaiatance. Not
one of them has Theseus' kingUness, or Hector's
grace, or ApoUo's beauty, or Niobe's subUme despair.

THE MEANING OF THE FUTURE 197
The marble strength brings out the human weakness,
the marble beauty emphasizes the meagre charms
of flesh and blood. But there is this great difference,
a difference beside which aU other differences be
come as nothing,
"To-day's brief passion limits their range;
It seethes with the morrow for us and more.
They are perfect — how else? They shall never change:
We are faulty — why not? We have time in store.
The Artificer's hand is not arrested
With us; we are rough-hewn, nowise polished:
They stand for our copy, and, once invested
With all they can teach, we shall see them abolished."
So, as in Rephan, their very perfection becomes the
sign of imperfection, and counts for so Uttle just
because it is so great. It must be always the blot
upon perfectness that it can go no farther. But
wherever there can be progress there is Ufe. This
is Abt Vogler's assurance, which brings with it the
added assurance that what is worth the keeping
cannot be destroyed,
"There shall never be one lost good ! What was, shall live as
before;
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;

198 PROPHECY AND POETRY
What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good
more;
On the earth 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 melo
dist
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 and
by."
And so he plays upon his organ, and prolongs the
pauses that there may be place for singing, and does
not shun the discords that wiU make harmony more
highly prized. Then the music ceases. It is earth
with him, and the reign of silence resumes its sway.
But what has been is presage of what must be, and
he is content.
We have already glanced at the old Grammarian,
who is one of Browning's most characteristic figures.

THE MEANING OF THE FUTURE 199
For the present moment he has the profound con
tempt, not of the prodigal who wastes it, but of the
man who has a miUion such in store. Its worth lies
not in what it is but in what it may become. The
future is the only explanation of his Ufe, but with
that explanation —
"Was it not great? Did not he throw on God,
(He loves the burthen) —
God's task to make the heavenly period
Perfect the earthen?
Did not he magnify the mind, show clear
Just what it all meant?
He would not discount life, as fools do here,
Paid by instalment."
In a way, it was the paradox of Christianity, though
it was worked out along scholastic lines. He saved
his life because he was so ready to lose it. The
moment counted for so little because the whole
scheme counted for so much.
But it is in "Easter Day" that Browning's thought
of the future gains its climax. And here, as with
Isaiah, though it comes in vision in which this world
and the next are mingled, the future of which the
poet chiefly speaks is that which comes to-morrow,

200 PROPHECY AND POETRY
rather than that which stretches away in some new
life. He knows that there are earthly Umitations in
plenty. They are the substance of things hoped for,
the evidence of things as yet not seen, and so there
is a dignity about them which helps to strip them of
their harshness. That man should feel them is a
sign that he may overcome them. But woe to those
who accept the Umitations as eternal, who take the
part for the whole, the incomplete for the finished,
the beginning for the end. They have their reward,
but what a reward it is I This is what the poet sets
forth in "Easter Day," Faith has been too hard.
The invisible seemed too far away and shadowy to
be much considered. "This worid,
This finite life, thou hast preferred.
In disbelief of God's own word,
To heaven and to infinity."
Then, in the vision of judgment, we have what fol
lows. That wiU not be thrust upon him for which
he has never cared. He wiU not find what he has not
looked for, "Thou art shut
Out of the heaven of spirit."

THE MEANING OF THE FUTURE 201
But he shaU have what he has desired, he shall gain
what he has sought, "Glut
Thy sense upon the world; 't is thine
Forever; take it!"
Is this judgment? Is the Divine bounty so free, so
open-handed ? "How? Is mine,
The world? (I cried, while my soul broke
Out in a transport.) Hast thou spoke
Plainly in that? Earth's exquisite
Treasures of wonder and delight
For me?"
Yes, it was all true. There was no reservation or
condition. Nothing should be withheld, except
what he had voluntarily ignored.
"Take all the ancient show!
The woods shall wave, the rivers flow,
And men apparently pursue
Their works, as they were wont to do,
While living in probation yet.
I promise not thou shalt forget
The past, now gone to its account;
But leave thee with the old amount

202 PROPHECY AND POETRY
Of faculties, nor less nor more,
Unvisited, as heretofore,
By God's free spirit, that makes an end.
So, once more, take thy world ! Expend
Eternity upon its shows,
Flung thee as freely as one rose
Out of a summer's opulence,
Over the Eden-barrier whence
Thou art excluded. Knock in vain ! "
But to one who had so much in possession, what
mattered exclusion from what he had not cared for,
after aU ? He would do so much, he would range so
far, he would fiU himself so fuU of joy and of ac
complishment. But while he yet unfolds his plans,
while he is yet rejoicing over the richness that is to
be his, the voice of judgment speaks another word.
"All partial beauty was a pledge
Of beauty in its plenitude;
But since the pledge sufficed thy mood,
Retain it ! Plenitude be theirs
Who looked above!"
The world with all its joy and achievement — that
world which he is stiU to have — was but the need
ful furniture for life's first stage. The very love to

THE MEANING OF THE FUTURE 203
which he turns to wrest escape from the hideous
completeness that he has purchased for himself was
all around him in the world, though he did not see it,
when he made his wretched choice. And so he
flings away his hopeless riches, his painful joy, his
ignominious contentment. He is a man, and not a
thing. "I cowered deprecatingly —
'Thou Love of God! Or let me die,
Or grant what shall seem heaven almost!
Let me not know that all is lost,
Though lost it be — leave me not tied
To this despair, this corpse-like bride !
Let that old life seem mine — no more —
With limitation as before,
With darkness, hunger, toil, distress;
Be all the earth a wilderness !
Only let me go on, go on,
Still hoping ever and anon,
To reach one eve the Better Land!'"
And when the vision leaves him, he sees Ufe with
other eyes than he had ever done before. He is not
looking for earth to be heaven. Heaven is stiU to
gain. The enjoyment of uninterrupted ease would
not be peace, but sluggishness. Never to be caUed

204 PROPHECY AND POETRY
on to choose, never to be called on to suffer, never
to be caUed on to submit, would mark with duU
completeness what it is his joy to know stiU to be
incomplete. He not only accepts earth's Umitations,
he welcomes them. "And so I live, you see.
Go through the world, try, prove, reject,
Prefer, still struggling to effect
My warfare; happy that I can
Be crossed and thwarted as a man,
Not left in God's contempt apart,
With ghastly smooth life, dead at heart,
Tame in earth's paddock as her prize."
God breathed the breath of life into men's nostrUs
for higher purposes than that they should browse
at wUl in fuU-fed vacancy.
It is not strange that a man in whose thought the
future occupied so prominent a place should have a
personal word to say about it, and Browning's last
poem is on just this subject. Do men — he calls
them fools — think that death means imprison
ment? WiU they pity him when they hear that he
is dead? He asks no pity, he looks forward to no
such state. For who was he, and what ?

THE MEANING OF THE FUTURE 205
"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."
Then there need be no uncertainty about what was
before him.
"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!'"
Across the centuries, the poet joins issue with the
prophet, and declares that the future sanctifies the
present, and that so the present should consecrate
the future, and make it sure.

CHAPTER VIII
THE FORCE OF PERSONALITY
THERE is nothing in the world more power
ful, and at the same time more mysterious,
than PersonaUty. No work can be done with
out a worker, but the worker is vastly more im
portant than the work. This force of personality
is present in the largest and in the smallest affairs
of Ufe. What was the Incarnation but the person
ality of God as it revealed itseU to men ? The Word
was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word
was made flesh and dwelt among us. The Son of
God was found in fashion as a man. He had His
friends, and did His work, and lived the Ufe of God
on earth. Ideas are ghosts. It takes Uving and
breathing men to deal with men. And so we have
that strange, unmapped region which is at once so
bright and so dim. We can teU very weU what
things are, but we cannot teU why they are. The
poet disUked Dr. FeU. He could not give the reason,
but he was absolutely certain of the fact. If he had
Uked Dr. FeU, it would have been just as hard to
206

THE FORCE OF PERSONALITY 207
give a satisfactory explanation of his feeUng. We
admire virtue, but we must aU confess that there are
virtuous persons whom we cannot tolerate. We
would go half a mUe out of our way rather than
have two minutes' conversation with them on high
subjects. We admire dignitaries, and speak no evU
of them. But we would rather stay at home forever
than travel with certain dignitaries, of the best
reputation in this world, and of whose heavenly
caUing there could be no doubt whatever. We ad
mire scholarship, but scholarship does not bind
heart to heart. Information often becomes tire
some. Back of the virtue there must be something
more than virtue, back of the dignity there must be
something more than dignity, back of the knowledge
there must be something more than knowledge,
which shaU redeem them from the dulness of mere
attributes and give them vital force.
The prophets were weU aware of this, when they
gazed into the future, and pictured not only the
regeneration which they trusted should one day come
upon the state, but the Messiah by means of whom
the regeneration should be possible. There was
Something to be done; but, more than that, there

2o8 PROPHECY AND POETRY
was Some One who could do it. Side by side with
Isaiah's passionate desire for a righteous nation, we
find his longing for a righteous man. He looked at
Jerusalem, and saw what it was with Ahaz king —
a glorious jewel worn by a grinning fool. Then,
with that spiritual imagination of his which thick
darkness was powerless to destroy, he saw it as it
might be, and as it ought to be. A king should reign
in righteousness ; a king who should be equal to his
task. The rioting and drunkenness, the gorgeous
clothes that covered rottenness, the days of the
city's shame and degradation — these should have an
end. As Isaiah looks forward to the time of deliver
ance, and to the messenger by whom the deliverance
should come, we cannot say whether the quaUties
of man or God predominate. The Deliverer — the
Saviour, as we have learned to call Him — should be
one of themselves, born in their land, tied to them
by the ties of kinship; one whom they had known,
and watched over, and helped in his days of helpless
ness, and loved as only little children can be loved.
But he must be one with every royal attribute, wise,
and powerful, and able to rule his land. And so,
from the court of Ahaz, which was everything that it

THE FORCE OF PERSONALITY 209
ought not to be, there comes Isaiah's picture of the
future ruler of the state. WeU might such an one be
called Immanuel, God with us. "Unto us a Child
is born, unto us a Son is given ; and the government
shaU be upon his shoulder; and his name shall be
caUed Wonderful, CounseUor, The Mighty God,
The Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace."
This figure comes and goes before Isaiah's vision.
Sometimes we hear nothing of him for long periods,
and then a sudden glimpse is given, which reveals
his character, or reminds men of the work which he
will have to do. He is of the family of David, a rod
out of the stem of Jesse, a gathering place not only
for the outcasts of Israel and the dispersed of Judah,
but for the Gentiles also. Just as in the New Testa
ment St. Paul can speak of Christ as one who breaks
down the middle waU of partition between man and
man, and who reconciles aU difference through His
own love, so does the prophet speak of this Messiah
in whom he trusts. To a vexed and troubled earth
he brings the spirit of the Lord, the spirit of wisdom
and understanding, of counsel and might, of knowl
edge and of the fear of the Lord. Where he goes,
the ancient strifes are at an end, and the world is
14

210 PROPHECY AND POETRY
new. Though he smites with the rod of his mouth,
and slays the wicked with the breath of his lips,
righteousness and faithfulness are the quaUties by
which he rules.
At another time, the Messiah is pictured simply
as a man, and we see that in the prophet's mind there
are no limits to what a man can do. He shall be as
an hiding-place from the wind and a covert from the
tempest, as rivers of water in a dry place, as the
shadow of a great rock in a weary land. Here we
have the force of personaUty gathered up, and ex
pressed within a single sentence. It means sjon-
pathy, the making of troubles easier and burdens
Ughter. It means feUowship, the putting to flight of
loneUness, the bringing in of another's power and
of another's help. It means strength, not from
within but from without, the strength through which
one's own strength grows. It means refreshment,
the ability to turn away from that which dries and
withers, and to make a fresh start with new Ufe and
with new hope. It means affection, that giving of
one's seU which we are taught is the chief attribute
of God, that fostering care with which the father pro
tects his children, and the mother watches over her

THE FORCE OF PERSONALITY 211
young. These are things of which we may read in
books, and which have their place in systems of
thought and in lists of virtues. But they have no
real existence until the time when they are given by
men to men.
Thus far we have confined our survey to that por
tion of Isaiah's book in which the prophet is himseU
the central figure. From Assyria to Egypt, his
watchful gaze takes in the world. He warns, he
threatens, he counsels, he pleads, he bears constant
witness to the Divine Master who has appointed him
his task. With the fortieth chapter, we come to a
new time and a new atmosphere. Isaiah himself
has long since disappeared. The city which he strove
so earnestly to bring to a sense of her opportunities
and her responsibilities has been destroyed. The
people who, whUe they had it, valued so lightly what
they had, are now in exUe, their spirit broken, Uving
only in the future and in the past. " They that led
us away captive required of us then a song, and
melody in our heaviness : Sing us one of the songs of
Zion," But they asked what was impossible. "How
shaU we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?"
The problems of Isaiah's day have not indeed been

212 PROPHECY AND POETRY
solved, for they were problems which are stiU to be
found in modern states, but the conditions of this
new time are such that they no longer press for a
solution. There is no need of hurling invective at
those who have lost the very means of sinning their
old sins, or of trying to break the lawless spirit of
those whose hearts are broken.
If our comparison were between Isaiah and
Browning considered simply as individuals, these
latter chapters of the Book of Isaiah would be quite
beyond its scope. But, from a Uterary point of view,
the use of many centuries has stamped Isaiah's name
upon them, and has given them a permanent abiding-
place within his pages. We know that Isaiah did
not write them, but we do not know who did, and so
they have always been called by the name which ac
cident, or tradition, or association has bestowed upon
them. In their subject-matter, and their structure,
and their method, they differ materiaUy from the
earlier book. They deal with new times and new
conditions. But in their treatment of the force of
personality they yield no whit to Isaiah himseU, in
the days when he was looking for the Messiah who
should come. Out of the whole Old Testament, it

THE FORCE OF PERSONALITY 213
is here that the spirit of the New Testament is ap
proached most closely. No doubt, there are critical
questions which are perplexing and obscure, but,
while the mind may not always be certain of the
meaning, the whole passage speaks plainly to the
heart. The prophet reminds his people that even
in these days of their suffering and their adversity
there is stiU a work for them to do for God. This
nation of his, wandering, lonely, stripped of all that
went to make up its ancient glory, is still the nation
that God chose for HimseU from among all the na
tions of the earth. If the old responsibilities have
been taken from them, new responsibilities are set
forth to take their place. "It is a Ught thing that
thou shouldest be my servant to raise up the tribes
of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of Israel:
I wiU also give thee for a Ught to the Gentiles, that
thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the
earth." There is nothing local nor provincial about
their task. Rather it brings them into touch with
the whole world. Moreover, it is a work so intimate,
so personal, that the prophet cannot express himseU
by speaking of it as belonging only to the state. The
state is an individual, a person, with a distinct Ufe of

214 PROPHECY AND POETRY
its own. The figure of the Servant of the Lord, per
haps at first oiUy a personification of the nation,
takes on more and more the breath of life, untU at
last it becomes only less heroic and overpowering
than the New Testament figure in which it reaches
its fulfilment. If this is an ideal conception, it is a
conception which possesses aU the quaUties which
go to make up a living soul. The Lord speaks to
this servant of His as a man speaks to his own
familiar friend. "Fear thou not; for I am with
thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I wiU
strengthen thee; yea, I wiU help thee; yea, I wiU
uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness."
Just as Isaiah heard God's caU, and straightway
offered himseU to meet the need, so now the Servant
is sent out to do God's work, a work which is de
scribed in the very words that by and by were to be
used of Jesus Christ. "I the Lord have caUed thee
in righteousness, and wUl hold thine hand, and wUl
keep thee, and give thee for a covenant of the people,
for a Ught of the GentUes; to open the bUnd eyes,
to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them
that sit in darkness out of the prison-house." From
the very beginning the Servant has been appointed

THE FORCE OF PERSONALITY 215
to this task. "The Lord hath called me from the
womb ; from the bowels of my mother hath He made
mention of my name." The Servant can perceive
the dignity and honor of his calling. He is quick to
hear the voice of God, and with the tongue of the
learned, the tongue of one who has been taught and
understands, he knows how to speak a word in
season to the weary, to bring the peace of God to
those who are distressed. He is not to be discouraged
nor turned back. Whatever happens, he has set
his face like a flint, and though there may be failure
in the sight of men, in God's sight he is assured of
final victory.
The prophet reaches his climax in that passage
which has been read for centuries on Good Friday,
and in which the Old Testament seems to pass fairly
over into the New. The one thing lacking to this
sublime Person is a name. He stands there, and
bears his witness to the great things man can do.
He shows that character means more than circum
stance, that submission is more powerful than con
quest, that it is he who is ready to lose his Ufe who
saves it, after aU. For himseU, there is only the most
dismal failure. Even those who should have been

2x6 PROPHECY AND POETRY
his friends were found apart, lending no helping
hand. "He is despised and rejected of men; a man
of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid
as it were our faces from him ; he was despised, and
we esteemed him not." But out of aU this weakness
and this iU-success, he does that service which stands
for the image of God in man, and in the possibiUty
of which there Ues that human dignity which is
only less than the Divine. What does his own re
jection matter? It is not in terms of himseU that
his Ufe can be expressed. "Surely, he hath borne
our griefs, and carried our sorrows. He was wounded
for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniqui
ties; the chastisement of our peace was upon him;
and with his stripes we are healed." These are the
things that man can do for man. And these are the
things that none but a Uving man can do.
There is no region in which the ancient prophet —
including not only the patriot who Uved in the eighth
century before Christ, but Isaiah in the wider liter
ary sense — and our modern poet come closer to
gether than they do just here. The three thousand
years that separate them, the countless differences of
environment and circumstance, become as nothing

THE FORCE OF PERSONALITY 217
when viewed from the standpoint of their common
reaUzation of the worth of man. This is a key-note
of Browning's writing. Even if he is engaged only
in putting some abstruse system of philosophy into
metrical form, it seldom happens that there is not
some man, sharply defined and clearly individual
ized, out of whose mouth comes whatever there may
be of speculation or opinion. These are Ferishtah's
Fancies, not mere abstract thought. There is no
poet but Shakespeare who deals so constantly with
persons. To one of his volumes he gave the title
"Men and Women." He is "human at the red-ripe
of the heart."
The emphasis which Browning lays upon person
aUty is everywhere impUcit in his work. It is present
so constantly that it is hard to isolate it, to perceive
it more in one place than another. We have seen
already something of the vigor with which he por
trays Guido, and Pompilia, and Caponsacchi. These
are no shadows, they are flesh and blood. "The
Ring and the Book" is something more than Utera
ture; it is Rome. We hear the crowd as it surges
through the streets. We see the many types from
which any multitude must be made up. We be-

2x8 PROPHECY AND POETRY
come impatient at their half-understanding, their half
knowledge, " so universal is their plague of squint,"
These people who have no names, who emerge
but for a moment from the throng and then are
lost again, are yet instinct with Ufe, There is
"some man of quality
Who — breathing musk from lace-work and brocade,
His solitaire amid the flow of frill,
Powdered peruke on nose, and bag at back,
And cane dependent from the ruffled wrist —
Harangues in silvery and selectest phrase
'Neath waxlight in a glorified saloon
Where mirrors multiply the girandole:
Courting the approbation of no mob.
But Eminence This and All-Illustrious That
Who take snuff softly, range in well-bred ring,
Card-table-quitters for observance' sake,
Around the argument, the rational word —
How Quality dissertated on the case."
This is one group, and there are many other
groups who say their say, with varying emphasis, with
opposite prejudices, from very different points of
view. Although the subject of the poem is the
tragedy of Pompilia, there is scarcely a corner of the
city which it does not touch. The reader feels that

THE FORCE OF PERSONALITY 2x9
the Rome of 1698 is almost as real to him as the
town in which he Uves, and that these people who
come and go in the poet's pages are his own ac
quaintances and neighbors. Perhaps the incidental
and minor characters are the most vivid, because
they are less directly connected with a theme which,
in itseU, must seem strange and far away. But the
more prominent personages are also sharply in
dividualized. There is no possibiUty, for example,
of confusing the two lawyers, for aU the likeness that
the practice of the same profession inight suggest.
It is true, there is an absurdity about them both, and
a venaUty, and a low professionalism, which puts
their own advantage above truth and justice. But
they are quite distinct. On the one side is Master
Hyacinth de ArchangeUs, whose duty it is to make
Guido's defence. He has no interest in Guido; he
knows him guUty; but, for the glory that it wiU
bring himseU, he would Uke to get the culprit off.
He shows marveUous ingenuity in making the worse
appear the better reason. The bloodthirsty cut
throats whom Guido had hired to help him in his
crime the advocate represents as simple-minded in
nocents who bore no envy, hate, maUce, nor un-

220 PROPHECY AND POETRY
charitableness against the people they had put to
death, but who practiced murder only as a pleasant
means by which they might turn an honest penny.
When Guido himseU refused to give their miserable '
wages to these poor wretches, Master Hyacinth sees
in this only the token of a lofty spirit which would
not viUgarize vengeance by mixing it with mercenary
motives, and which essays a gentle missionary work
with the accompUces by sparing them the poUution
of the pay. He devotes himseU in a desultory man
ner to the preparation of his case, and the way in
which it is to be presented to the Pope.
"It's hard; you have to plead before these priests
And poke at them with Scripture, or you pass
For heathen and, what's worse, for ignorant
O' the quality o' the court and what it likes
By way of illustration of the law.
To-morrow stick in this, and throw out that,
And, having first ecclesiasticized,
Regularize the whole, next emphasize,
Then latinize, and lastly Cicero-ize,
Giving my Fisc his finish. There 's my speech!"
But, even while he works, his thought is not of
Guido nor of PompiUa, but of the family dinner
which is to be served presently, and of the Uttle son

THE FORCE OF PERSONALITY 221
who comes that day to eight years old, and whom
he apostrophizes under a bewildering confusion of
pet names.
On the other side is Doctor Bottinius, the Fiscal
Advocate, whose business it is to prove Guido
guilty — no hard task. He is no less a scoundrel
than his opponent, without the redeeming kindli
ness of domesticity. His interest is solely in him
self. If he could only read his speech instead of
printing it I If the scurvy courtroom could be turned
into an immense hall, with fifty judges sitting in a
row to praise his eloquence ! He would rise, and
bend, and look about, consciously unconscious,
whUe the multitude waited breathlessly for him to
begin ! We long for Hyacinth and his lambs' fries
and the Uttle CinonceUo, They are far better than
this man with his dull conceit, his labored classicism,
his far-fetched similes that have no point, his studied
search for some low motive, his garish seU-import-
ance. The thing which he had to do was plain
enough, but he plunges and tramples untU the
straight road becomes a quagmire. The PompUia
whom he describes is not the PompiUa who teUs her
pitiful story, and whose innocence and purity can

222 PROPHECY AND POETRY
turn Caponsacchi from a weak priest into a strong
man. She is an imaginary creation of a man who
measures aU things by his own low standards, for
whom the whole world is smirched and yeUowed
because he can only see it through his bUnking eyes.
Bottinius is Uke those traveUing evangelists who set
out to prove the inspiration of the Scripture, which
needs no proof, and who bring to their superfluous
task such grotesque statements, such impossible in
terpretations, such unnatural sequences, such pal
pable contradictions, that their astounded hearers
are sorely tempted to escape from the confusion by
turning atheists at once. Bottinius prosecutes Guido,
but it is the prosecutor who almost succeeds in
making him seem innocent.
If these precious specimens should move us to
think too unkindly of our kind, over against them
is set the majestic figure,
"Antonio Pignatelli of Naples, Pope
Who had trod many lands, known many deeds.
Probed many hearts, beginning with his own,
And now was far in readiness for God."
This is the man to whom the case must come for
final adjudication. He pays no heed to the cunning

THE FORCE OF PERSONALITY 223
compliments by which the opposing counsel seek to
distract his attention from the point at issue. He
brushes aside the pitfaUs of irrelevant evidence which
they prepare, and goes straight to the very root of
things. He has no mind for sentimental pity, nor
for a mercy which should lend encouragement to
crime. He recognizes the responsibiUty of judg
ment; his own judgment cannot be far away. He
goes over all the papers in the case, and then he
takes the actors in it under consideration, and reads
their souls. There is nothing here of the siUy gossip
of the street-corner, or of the blundering evasion of
the hired counsel who have no care except for gain
or glory. The old man knows the world. Though
he is priest and Pope, he is not out of touch with
human nature. He speaks of an infant's birth, and
the spirit in which it should be met.
"Men cut free their souls
From care in such a case, fly up in thanks
To God, reach, recognize His love for once."
He hears PompiUa's story from the beginning, and
knows that it must be true because she teUs it, just
as he knows that a man Uke Guido must be aU
false.

224 PROPHECY AND POETRY
"First of the first.
Such I pronounce Pompilia, then as now
Perfect in whiteness; stoop thou down, my child,
Give one good moment to the poor old Pope,
Heart -sick at having all his world to blame —
Let me look at thee in the flesh as erst,
Let me enjoy the old clean linen garb,
Not the new splendid vesture ! Armed and crowned,
' Would Michael, yonder, be, nor crowned nor armed,
The less pre-eminent angel ? Ever)fwhere
I see in the world the intellect of man,
That sword, the energy his subtle spear.
The knowledge which defends him like a shield —
Ever3rwhere; but they make not up, I think,
The marvel of a soul like thine, earth's flower
She holds up to the softened gaze of God!"
The judgment which he makes, though it must be
made with his own powers and with the human
possibility of error, is in God's sight, and, humanly
speaking, in God's place.
"Under Thy measureless, my atom width!"
But he does not hesitate.
"I stand here, not off the stage though close
On the exit : and my last act, as my first,
I owe the scene, and Him who armed me thus

THE FORCE OF PERSONALITY 225
With Paul's sword as with Peter's key. I smite
With my whole strength once more, ere end my part,
Ending, so far as man may, this offence."
There could be no more characteristic saying. The
Pope is no abstraction, but a man who is alive from
head to foot.
There is hardly one of Browning's poems about
which something of this sort could not be said.
Fifine is real. Balaustion is real. Pippa is real. So
is FUippo Baldinucci, as he sits in bloodthirsty or
thodoxy and mourns the time when Jews could be
pelted with impunity, and kicked and cursed to
the glory of God and to one's heart's content. So
is the Lost Leader, with the breaking of faith and
the severing of service,
"Life's night begins; let him never come back to us!
There would be doubt, hesitation, and pain,
Forced praise on our part — the glimmer of twilight,
Never glad confident morning again!"
So is the Uttle Lippo Lippi, as he describes the
manner in which he came to be a monk.
"I was a baby when my mother died,
And father died and left me in the street.
I starved there, God knows how, a year or two,
IS

226 PROPHECY AND POETRY
On fig-skins, melon-parings, rinds, and shucks.
Refuse and rubbish. One fine frosty day,
My stomach being empty as your hat,
The wind doubled me up and down I went.
Old Aunt Lapaccia trussed me with one hand,
(Its fellow was a stinger as I knew),
And so along the wall, over the bridge,
By the straight cut to the convent. Six words there,
While I stood munching my first bread that month:
'So, boy, you're minded,' quoth the good fat father,
Wiping his own mouth, 'twas refection-time —
'To quit this very miserable world?
Will you renounce' . . . 'the mouthful of bread?' thought I;
By no means! Brief, they made a monk of me;
I did renounce the world, its pride and greed,
Palace, farm, villa, shop, and banking-house,
Trash, such as these poor devils of Medici
Have given their hearts to — all at eight years old ! "
These are only a few of the multitude of men and
women to whom the poet's creative imagination has
given life.
But Browning does more than fiU his poems with
persons. Like the old prophets, he shows what per
sonality can do. Perhaps the most striking iUustra
tion is to be found in "Saul," when David comes to
the king and tries to arouse him from his fit of dumb

THE FORCE OF PERSONALITY 227
madness. For three days not a sound of prayer nor
of praise has come from the tent where Saul and the
Spirit are contending in mortal strife. Then David
prays, and prays again, and takes his harp, and goes
into the darkness. "Here is David, thy servant!"
One after another he plays the tunes to which Saul
has been accustomed, which might turn the tortured
mind in some new direction, and relieve the tense
nerves and over-wrought brain — the song which
brings the sheep back to the fold at night, the song
to which the crickets listen, and the quails, and the
jerboas in the desert, the help-tune of the reapers,
their wine-song when " eye lights eye in good friend
ship," the dirge when the dead man is borne to his
last resting-place, the marriage chant, the proces
sional hymn which the Levites sing as they go up
to the altar. Then, at the very first token that Saul
hears, David breaks forth into the praise of Ufe.
"Oh, our manhood's prime vigor! No spirit feels waste,
Not a muscle is stopped in its playing, nor sinew unbraced.
Oh, the wild joys of living, the leaping from rock up to rock,
The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool silver
shock

228 PROPHECY AND POETRY
Of the plunge in a pool's living water, the hunt of the bear,
And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair.
And the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with gold-dust
divine,
And the locust-flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full draught of
wine,
And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell
That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well.
How good is man's life, the mere living ! how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!"
It was music which was having its effect on Saul,
but it was music which no one but David could have
made. He goes on to sing of Saul's early years, his
father's sword, his mother's blessing, his comrades,
his honors, his responsibiUties. Then, little by Uttle,
Saul comes back from that region of desolation and
unrest in which his soul had been astray. He rouses
himself, and listens, and knows the difference be
tween death and Ufe. What more can David do to
help him? He can only give himseU. There come
back to him fancies which he had first known in the
pasture, when his sheep fed around him in sUence,
and a soUtary eagle floated above him in the heavens.
He speaks of these, the schemes of life which he had
evolved in those old days, its best rules and right

THE FORCE OF PERSONALITY 229
uses, the courage which makes it worth whUe, and
the prudence which keeps safely what is worth the
keeping. Saul listens more and more.
"He slowly resumed
His old motions and habitudes kingly."
He smooths his disheveled hair, and wipes away the
huge sweat that bathes his countenance, and girds
his loins, and feels for the precious armlets that he
was used to wear,
"He is Saul, ye remember in glory, — ere error had bent
The broad brow from the daily communion ; and still, though
much spent
Be the life and the bearing that front you, the same, God did
choose
To receive what a man may waste, desecrate, never quite
lose!"
He has come to himseU; and he has come to himself
through David, and through David's love. And
David knows this, and presently he knows what it
impUes, Saul must begin anew, and what assurance
is there of his success? He is a failure, a mistake,
a ruin. It is something that he realizes this, but
salvation, and redemption, and restoration are yet

230 PROPHECY AND POETRY
to gain. Where may they come from ? Then David
sees the sum of the whole matter,
"Would I fain in my impotent yearning do all for this man,
And dare doubt He alone shall not help him, who yet alone
can?"
What David has done is but an earnest of what God
wiU do,
"See the King — I would help him but cannot, the wishes fall
through.
Could I wrestle to raise him from sorrow, grow poor to enrich,
To fill up his life, starve my own out, I would, knowing which,
I know that my service is perfect; Oh, speak through me
now!
Would I suffer for him that I love? So wouldst thou — so
wilt thou!"
The personality of men derives its significance and
power from the Infinite PersonaUty of God; and
what man does, by himseU, becomes as nothing
compared with what he would do, with God for
his aUy.
It is. not often that Browning speaks of himself.
He teUs us that he is an artist, and not a public
show. He declares that if Shakespeare used the
sonnet as a key with which to unlock his heart be-

THE FORCE OF PERSONALITY 231
fore the world, he were the less Shakespeare for
that very reason. The highest personality implies
reserve. But now and then he lays aside this reti
cence, and speaks, not for his creatures, but for him
seU. We have seen the personal faith which animated
. Paracelsus, except for Pauline the poet's earliest
character, and which stayed with Browning until
the "Epilogue" completed his life's work. There
are three or four times when that faith is added to
hope and love, and made his own direct confession.
He often teUs us what soul has done for soul, but in
these rare instances we know what it is that his own
soul has gained. We find it in "By the Fireside."
There is the fresh Italian landscape, the Apennines,
the Uttle lake, the yellow mountain-flowers, the
creeper's leaf dashed with a splash of crimson, the
stone bridge and chapel, the Uchens and the hemp-
stalks and the ivy, the bird that sings there aU
through the long day, and the stray sheep that
comes to the pond to drink. But it is the human
companionship that gives the place its meaning.
"My perfect wife, my Leonor,
Oh heart, my own, oh eyes, mine too.
Whom else could I dare look backward for?"

232 PROPHECY AND POETRY
And so he reviews the years that they have spent
together. One scene after another takes memory
by storm, and is for a Uttle whUe as if it were of the
very substance of eternity.
"Oh moment, one and infinite!
The water slips o'er stock and stone;
The West is tender, hardly bright:
How gray at once is the evening grown —
One star, its chrysolite."
There are many recoUections, and as he reconstructs
the past he comes to see what it is that has made his
Ufe complete, and has given to nature to gain her
best from him. He is
"One born to love you, sweet!"
But the past impUes the future. What of the years
to come? "Think, when our one soul understands,
The great Word which made all things new,
When earth breaks up and heaven expands,
How will the change strike me and you
In the house not made with hands?

THE FORCE OF PERSONALITY 233
"Oh I must feel your brain prompt mine,
Your heart anticipate my heart,
You must be just before, in fine,
See and make me see, for your part,
New depths of the divine!"
The influence of one loving human heart upon an
other is nothing less than this. If it begins on earth,
it cannot reach its end except in heaven.
Something of the same sort we find again in " One
Word More," the dedication with which he offers the
volume called "Men and Women" to his wife.
It is in praise of that innermost expression of one's
seU which the world cannot know, nor even guess at,
but which is reserved as the possession, choice from
its very rareness, of the one best loved, Raphael
painted his pictures for the world to see, but for
one only he made a century of sonnets, which no
other eyes might read, Dante once set out to paint
an angel upon which none but Beatrice should ever
look, but presently there broke in upon him "certain
people of importance," noisy and bustUng and tire
some, as people of importance are so apt to be —
and he stopped. He could write the Divine Comedy
in spite of them, but this other work of his they

234 PROPHECY AND POETRY
spoiled. It is so with our own poet. He has some
thing to give the world, but he has something else
to give to the one who is more than aU the world to
him. "God be thanked, the meanest of His creatures
Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with,
One to show a woman when he loves her!"
And it is this second side which marks that separate-
ness, that impossibility of being ever merged in any
class or kind, of which the aposde speaks when he
teUs of the new name which shaU be written, which
no man knows save he who receives it.
"Thus they see you, praise you, think they know you!
There, in turn I stand with them and praise you —
Out of my own self, I dare to phrase it.
But the best is when I glide from out them,
Cross a step or two of dubious twilight.
Come out on the other side, the novel
Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of,
Where I hush and bless myself with silence."
When Mrs. Browning died, the poet, as we should
have expected, made small sign. His wound was too
deep for the world to gaze at. But while he never
asks for sympathy, and whUe pity could only be an

THE FORCE OF PERSONALITY 235
insult, twice at least he speaks in such a way that he
who has ears to hear can understand. Once is in
"Prospice." Does he fear death? Not he.
"For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
The black minute 's at end,
And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
Shall dwindle, shall blend,
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!"
The Other time is at the beginning of "The Ring and
the Book," his greatest work. He has marked out
the paths by which his readers are to go, and now
the story stretches away before them. But first —
"Never may I commence my song, my due
To God who best taught song by gift of thee,
Except with bent head and beseeching hand —
That still, despite the distance and the dark,
What was, again may be; some interchange
Of grace, some splendor once thy very thought,
Some benediction anciently thy smile:
Never conclude, but raising hand and head
Thither, where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn
For all hope, all sustalnment, all reward,

236 PROPHECY AND POETRY
Their utmost up and on, — so blessing back
In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home,
Some whiteness, which, I judge, thy face makes proud,
Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall!"
The story takes us often into regions where base
desires and mean passions have their dweUing. If
now and then it rises to the heights, there are many
times when it drags through the depths, or bumps
painfuUy about among the shallows of our humanity.
But this introduction reaches through the whole.
It adds to the poem something that could not have
been imparted in any other way. In its own degree,
it helps us to understand the feeUng that must have
come to Moses when he heard the voice speaking to
him out of the midst of the bush, and saying-—
"Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place
whereon thou standest is holy ground."
We have seen that Isaiah's conception of per
sonality could be compressed into a single sen
tence. Browning's conception of it may be found
complete in one of his very briefest poems. There is
no direct allusion, but we know what he means.
Without it, and with it — we may perceive the dif
ference.

THE FORCE OF PERSONALITY 237
"Such a starved bank of moss!
Till, that May morn,
Blue ran the flash across;
Violets were born 1
"Sky — what a scowl of cloud!
Till, near and far,
Ray on ray split the shroud;
Splendid, a star !
"World — how it walled about
Life with disgrace !
Till God's own smile came out:
That was thy face!"
It is the teaching of St. John in the New Testa
ment that the Word of God was with the Father in
the beginning, and from aU eternity. In Him was
Ufe, and the life was the Ught of men. Speaking at
another time, and in a somewhat different way, he
declares that he that hath the Son hath Ufe, and that
he that hath not the Son of God hath not Ufe. The
apostle is only repeating his Master's teaching.
Christ Himself spoke of Himself as the Resurrection
and the LUe; as the Way, the Truth, and the Life;
as one who had come that men might have Ufe, and
that they might have it more abundantly; as the

238 PROPHECY AND POETRY
Vine of which the disciples were the branches, and
apart from which they could do nothing. This
fulness of life in Jesus Christ, which He imparts to
men in such large measure, men must share with
those who are closest to them as best they may.
No knowledge, no thought, no table of the Law can
take its place. It is the one thing in the world in
which the image of God upon us bears no counter
feit. The prophets learned this when God spake to
them at sundry times and in divers manners. The
poets learned it when they made themselves the
spokesmen for their fellow-men, and spoke to God
of all that is in man's heart. It is in personality that
Ufe consists ; not in the abundance of the things that
a man possesseth, but in what he is. This is what
Isaiah meant when he said that a man should be as
an hiding-place from the wind and a covert from the
tempest. This is what Browning meant when, in the
face of one whom he loved, he saw God's smUe.

CHAPTER IX
THE BESETTING GOD
WE have followed Isaiah and Browning
through various regions in which they
have been equaUy at home. There are of course
great divergences between them, not only such as
would be inevitable from the fact that one is a
poet and the other a prophet, but also of a deeper
and more thoroughgoing sort. It would be impossi
ble to find in Isaiah anything at all approaching to
Browning's Ughter moods, or to the subtleties of
philosophical speculation in which he was some
times led to bury his poetic gift. It would be im
possible to find in Browning anything that should
correspond to Isaiah's keen sense of personal respon
sibiUty for the condition of the nation, or to the
watchful anxiety with which he kept himself always
in the very thick of things. Isaiah was as litde of an
artist as Browning of a statesman. Isaiah lavished
upon his own Jerusalem that passionate affection —
fervent with all the fervor of the burning East —
which Browning, in more temperate fashion, be-
239

240 PROPHECY AND POETRY
stowed, not upon his own land, but upon his adopted
Italy, For Isaiah the stage direction must always be
To-day and Here, For Browning it might be At Any
Time and Anywhere, But in many ways the two are
strangely and strikingly aUke; temperamentally,
in their energy, their human interest, their breadth
and clarity of view; and in the very subject-matter
of their thought, as, each in his own way and with
his own background, they speak of the good which
God can wrest from evil, of that spark of the Divine
in man which cannot be destroyed, of the future and
aU that it may hold of hope and promise, and of that
power of personaUty which gives to the weakest man
a force which no abstract idea could ever have. It
remains to consider that meeting-ground of thought
which gives significance to aU their other likenesses,
that recognition of God as the Lord and Giver of
life, no absentee, but a DweUer and Worker in His
own world, without which Isaiah could not have
been a prophet, nor Browning a great religious
poet. It is a commonplace of prophecy that God is the
foundation upon which its work is buUt, Even the
false prophets hide their falseness behind His name,

THE BESETTING GOD 241
and try to clothe their lying words with the semblance
of His approval. The great prophets of the Old
Testament have their own methods of setting forth
this truth. To Jeremiah God is, at least to some ex
tent, a Taskmaster. He would keep sUent, but God
compels his speech. He would turn aside from
troubling men's souls, but God caUs him back again,
and he cannot hold his peace. To Ezekiel God is
the Vision of a great glory. He wanders by the river
Chebar, forlorn, disconsolate, distressed. 'He would
Uft up his eyes to the hills from whence comes
strength, but the flat lands of Babylon are all about
him. Then, into the dreariness of his exUe, there
comes the whirlwind, and the great cloud, and the
fire, the appearance of Uving creatures, and the
throne Uke sapphire, and the likeness of One that sat.
upon the throne, Ezekiel is young and vigorous,
trained to serve the state, fuU of the zeal that ought
to be — even though there are many times when it is
not — the constant companion of privUege, and of
love for his fatherland. At the very outset of his
career, every door of opportunity is closed against
him. Like the older prophets, he would have given
himseU for Jerusalem, to live for her, to suffer for
16

242 PROPHECY AND POETRY
her, to die for her; but he is torn from his home,
and set to eat his heart out in a dull heathen viUage.
Whether it is weU or iU with Jerusalem he can learn
only from some casual messenger. If good comes,
he can have no share in it; and if evil befaUs, he
cannot even have the satisfaction of knowing the
worst. But, while he is so shut out from earth, the
heavens are opened to him. If he may not dweU in
the Holy City, God wiU be with him where he is.
And so we have those dazzUng descriptions of the
Divine glory which surpass those of any other
prophet, and that elaborate account of the Temple,
which he could think about, even though he might
not serve in it.
But to Isaiah God is more than a Taskmaster or
a Heavenly Vision. If we may say it reverendy,
the prophet thinks of Him as a FeUow- Worker, an
AUy. " I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom
shaU I send, and who wiU go for us? Then said I,
Here am I; send me," In these two sentences we
have the whole story of the prophet's Ufe, AU else
is a mere matter of detail. He recognizes his own
unworthiness. The coal from the altar must be laid
upon his mouth, and touch his Ups, that it may take

THE BESETTING GOD 243
away his sin. But God's worthiness covers those
who do God's work.
The whole Book of Isaiah is the assertion, in one
form and another, that God is present in His world,
as One who cares, and watches, and forbears, and
hopes. The Psalmist's words would furnish a suit
able motto for it. " Thou art about my path and about
my bed, and spiest out aU my ways. If I climb up into
heaven, Thou art there ; if I go down to hell, Thou
art there also. If I take the wings of the morning
and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea; even
there also shaU Thy hand lead me, and Thy right
hand shaU hold me." This is an adequate descrip
tion of the spirit in which Isaiah does his work. If
he speaks of the sins of his people, it is because, in
committing them, they have failed in their duty
towards God. If he looks for the Messiah who
should come, it is because he comes to establish
God's kingdom upon earth. His own caU is the com
mission which God has given him for that war in
which there is no discharge. This is impUed in
every smaUest portion of the ground which we have
already covered — Assyria is a tool which God holds
in His hand and compels to do His work; the

244 PROPHECY AND POETRY
remnant which must return bears constant witness
to the fact that the image of God in man can never
be altogether blotted out; the future is God's har
vest time ; man's strength is but an indication and a
suggestion of what God's strength must be. When
the prophet mounts his watch-tower and looks about
him over the world, it is because he knows that it is
stiU God's world, even though it lies in wickedness.
God is a devouring fire which shaU burn up the chaff,
but as for him that walketh righteously and speaketh
uprightly, that despiseth the gain of oppressions,
that shaketh his hands from holding of bribes, that
stoppeth his ears from hearing of blood, and shutteth
his eyes from seeing evil, he shall dweU on high
with God. As a lion clings to its prey and wiU not
let it go, though a mob of shepherds Uft voice and
hand against him, so God cannot be driven from the
people whom He has chosen, not to destroy them Uke
the Uon, but to cherish and protect. As a mother-
bird hovers over her nest, so God watches over
Jerusalem to cover and deUver it. In the whole Book
of Esther the name of God is not once used. But in
the Book of Isaiah there is hardly a sentence where
it is not at least impUed.

THE BESETTING GOD 245
There are many differences between the two parts
of the Book of Isaiah, but in passing from the first to
the second, so far as the recognition of God's con-
troUing presence in the world is concerned, if there is
any difference it is only in the direction of greater
intensity. In the earUer chapters, Isaiah is God's
f eUow- worker ; but in the later chapters the very
namelessness of the prophet who writes in exile does
but emphasize the fact that God is aU, and in aU.
In a few sentences at the beginning the prophet
sets forth what he is to say over and over again in
different ways. " Comfort ye, comfort ye my people,
saith your God." This is the burden that is laid
upon him. It is his God who speaks, and they are
God's people to whom he must go. They have been
desolate. Now God is coming back to them. " Speak
ye home to the heart of Jerusalem, and cry unto her,
that her warfare is accompUshed, that her iniquity is
pardoned ; for she hath received of the Lord's hand
double for aU her sins."
The prophet bears his message — a Gospel before
the Gospel's day. It is not something to be heard
quietly, and without emotion. It must quicken the
pulses and stir the blood. Jerusalem is in ruins, but

246 PROPHECY AND POETRY
no matter; the dawn of better things is already
close at hand. " O Zion, that bringest good tidings,
get thee up into the high mountain; O Jerusalem,
that bringest good tidings, Uft up thy voice with
strength; Uft it up, be not afraid; say unto the
cities of Judah, Behold your God!" His presence
means His help and guidance. They are to go
back, but it is an army in which there is Utde martial
strength. But God has all that they lack, " Behold,
the Lord God wUl come with strong hand, and His
arm shall rule for Him; behold. His reward is with
Him, and His work before Him," And not only is
God the Leader of their expedition, but He is the
Protector of those who are weak, and helpless, and
unfitted for the effort that must be made, " He shaU
feed His flock like a shepherd; He shaU gather the
lambs with His arm, and carry them in His bosom,
and shaU gently lead those that are with young,"
So presently the prophet sums up his message in a
question and in a comprehensive statement,
"Hast thou not known? Hast thou not heard,
that the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of
the ends of the earth, f ainteth not, neither is weary ?
There is no searching of His understanding. He

THE BESETTING GOD 247
giveth power to the faint, and to them that have no
might He increaseth strength,
"Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and
the young men shall utterly fall. But they that
wait upon the Lord shaU renew their strength;
they shaU mount up with wings as eagles; they
shall run and not be weary; and they shaU walk
and not faint."
It would be hard to put all that God is and all
that God does in a plainer and stronger way. In
time — from the beginning; in space — to .the ends
of the earth; in knowledge, beyond knowledge.
With men, He can inspire them with the enthusiasm
which leads to extraordinary things; or He can go
with them on the forced marches which every sol
dier is called upon, now and then, to take, and for
which he needs aU his reserve of strength and wiU;
or He can walk with them, day by day, along the
common roads of life. Whether they soar, or run,
or walk, God is the companion of those who wait
upon Him.
The succeeding chapters are an elaboration of
this theme, Israel is God's people, the Servant is
the Servant of the Lord, Cyrus is God's chosen one

248 PROPHECY AND POETRY
to bring about a great deliverance, the idols at which
the prophet hurls his withering sarcasm are God's
adversaries. We hear God speaking of HimseU
with a positiveness which suggests nothing but the
certainty of Jesus Christ that He is the Son of God.
Do His people need Him? There is nothing that
He cannot do to help, "I am the Lord: That is
my name; and my glory wiU I not give to another,"
He is the first and the last, the Creator of Israel,
their Holy One, their King, "I, even I, am the
Lord, and beside me there is no Saviour, I have de
clared, and have saved, and I have showed when
there was no strange god among you; therefore ye
are my witnesses, saith the Lord, that I am God.
Yea, before the day wa's I am He ; and there is none
that can deliver out of my hand; I wiU work, and
who shaU let it,"
This is God's word to Israel, but beyond Israel
there are those others with whom no such binding
covenant had been made. There were those in
Israel, of course, who would have thrust them out,
or would at least have kept them at an immeasurable
distance. The God of Abraham, and Isaac, and
Jacob, was not for them. But not our prophet. He

THE BESETTING GOD 249
hears their cry, and puts it into words, " Doubtless
Thou art our Father, though Abraham be ignorant
of us, and Israel acknowledge us not." Wherever
men long for Him, there God wiU be. This is the
one condition of the invitation that is given. "Ho,
every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and
he that hath no money ; come ye, buy and eat ; yea,
come, buy wine and milk without money and with
out price." Israel itseU is glorified the more be
cause of the nations who come to it, not for its own
sake nor for their sakes, but because of the Lord
who is its God. The prophecy is fuU of climaxes,
but perhaps the climax of them aU is to be found in
that subUme chapter in which Israel is caUed upon
to take its old privilege once more, that it may do
God's work, not only in the new Jerusalem, but in
all the world. We read it as a hymn of comfort and
inspiration, but it is just as much a hymn of praise,
"Arise, shine, for thy Ught is come, and the glory
of the Lord is risen upon thee," It makes no differ
ence what there may be without, in the way of ob
stacle or hindrance; God is with them, and that is
enough. "Behold, the darkness shall cover the
earth, and gross darkness the people; but the Lord

250 PROPHECY AND POETRY
shall arise upon thee, and His glory shall be seen
upon thee." This glory shows itseU in their new
strength, and in an attractive power which they
never had before; the Gentiles coming to their
Ught, and kings to the brightness of their rising. It
is a picture which is in startUng contrast to their
present low estate. " Lift up thine eyes round about,
and see; aU they gather themselves together, they
come to thee; thy sons shaU come from far, and
thy daughters shall be nursed at thy side. Then
thou shalt see, and flow together, and thine heart
shaU fear, and be enlarged ; because the abundance
of the sea shaU be converted unto thee, the forces
of the Gentiles shaU come unto thee."
The picture is enlarged and amplified. We see
the camels of the desert, and the dromedaries of
Midian and Ephah. Sheba sends her treasures,
and Kedar her flocks. As doves to their windows,
or as clouds upon a summer's day, men come from
the isles and from the ends of the earth to the name
of the Lord their God, and to the Holy One of
Israel. The sons of strangers wiU build up the city
walls, and those who despised her will bow them
selves down in her, knowing that she is indeed the

THE BESETTING GOD 251
city of the Lord, The prophet finds that words are
scarcely equal to the glory which he would describe.
"Violence shaU be no more heard in thy land,
wasting nor destruction within thy borders; but
thou shalt caU thy walls Salvation, and thy gates
Praise, The sun shaU be no more thy Ught by
day; neither for brightness shall the moon give light
unto thee ; but the Lord shaU be unto thee an ever
lasting Ught, and thy God thy glory. Thy sun shaU
no more go down ; neither shaU thy moon withdraw
itself; for the Lord shaU be thine everlasting Ught,
and the days of thy mourning shaU be ended."
It is a magnificent picture of the restoration that
should come to Jerusalem. But it is also a picture
of the power and glory of Almighty God.
This perception of God immanent in the world
is of course of the very air in which prophecy was
born. It is prophecy's chief subject; indeed, there
could be no prophecy without it. With poetry it
is otherwise. While it is of the very nature of
prophecy that it must begin with God, poetry begins
with man, and works upward and outward along
the many roads by which the mind of man is wont
to travel. There is much poetry, and even much

252 PROPHECY AND POETRY
noble poetry, in which there is no word of God at
aU; but sooner or later a poet of the first magni
tude must speak of Him. Apart from God, he
cannot deal with the depths of man's soul, or with
the mountain-summits of man's mind. It is so
with Browning. He has many subjects, and he
speaks in many tones. Sometimes he is trivial; a
carping critic might even be disposed to caU him
trifling. Often he is so engrossed with the men
and women whom he has created that we see them
only at the moment of the poem's action, and are
given no opportunity for any further thought about
them. Often, as we have seen many times in pre
vious chapters, God is implicit in his work, a Char
acter without whom the drama could not go on,
away from whom the whole scene would be unin-
teUigible. The old Grammarian would be a carica
ture apart from God. So would the man who
sought to escape the tyrant, and who found sudden
safety when he prayed. So would the Pope. So
would David, as he brought new life back to Saul.
But while God holds no such commanding pre
eminence in Browning's thought as He must of
necessity have done with Isaiah and with the later

THE BESETTING GOD 253
Prophet of the ExUe, there are times when He is
not only the explanation and the justification of
the poet's characters, but when He is HimseU the
poet's chief subject. We need not caU again upon
the witness that is borne to Him in "Christmas
Eve," and "Easter Day." Most of the poems
which have been already quoted in other connec
tions might find an equaUy appropriate place in
our present comparison. Thus, in the case of
Johannes Agricola, we have a study in colossal
selfishness. He cares not a whit what may happen
to the rest of the world so long as he is safe. Their
very misfortunes serve to set forth his happiness
the more by contrast. But it is a strange sort of
selfishness, a selfishness consecrated, as it were,
and sanctified — the more hideous for that reason,
but also the more impressive, in that it shows how
men are wont to caU vice virtue, and how they seek
to bring God into connection even with their sins.
The monk's meditation turns presently into a cold
blooded picture of souls in heU, but what could be
more reUgious than the way in which it opens !
"There's heaven above, and night by night
I look right through its gorgeous roof;

254 PROPHECY AND POETRY
No suns and moons though e'er so bright
Avail to stop me; splendor-proof
I keep the broods of stars aloof;
For I intend to get to God,
For 't is to God I speed so fast,
For in God's breast, my own abode,
Those shoals of dazzling glory passed,
I lay my spirit down at last."
God is made the foundation, even though the struc
ture that is built upon Him is one which cannot
stand. With the Grammarian, God is the subject of
no such travesty. His aim is, not an impossible
salvation for a withered soul, but a fulness of know
ledge for which Ufe gives the opportunity. He
would love God, not only with heart and soul and
strength, but with aU his mind — a portion of our
Lord's commandment which many home-made
systems of religion have ignored. But it is one of
those things which marks the difference between
greatness and litdeness, between heroism and the
commonplace. "That low man seeks a little thing to do,
Sees it and does it:

THE BESETTING GOD 255
This high man, with a great thing to pursue,
Dies ere he knows it.
That low man goes on adding one to one,
His hundred's soon hit:
This high man, aiming at a million.
Misses an unit.
That, has the world here — should he need the next.
Let the world mind him !
This, throws himself on God, and unperplexed
Seeking shall find Him."
He cannot be content unless he shall gain the very
most from Ufe, and he knows that he cannot gain
the most without seeking the Highest and trusting
in the Best.
There is a method of confessing God which vir
tually amounts to a denial of Him. It is that attitude
towards Him which Arthur Hugh Clough satirizes
in his withering version of the Decalogue made easy.
"Thou shalt have one God only; who
Would be at the expense of two?"
The same thing is described in a clever couplet.
"They did not abolish the gods but they sent them well out of
the way.
With the rarest of nectar to drink, and blue fields of nothing
to sway."

256 PROPHECY AND POETRY
There is nothing of this sort with Browning, Even
when he does not name God's name, God is the
background against which he thinks his thoughts.
It is the soul's world, not the worm's world, which
he seeks, in which he believes, and of whose final
triumph, amid whatever strifes and storms, he is
always certain. "I have faith such end shall be;
From the first. Power was — I knew;
Life has made clear to me
That, strive but for closer view
Love were as plain to see.
"When see? When there dawns a day,
If not on the homely earth.
Then yonder, worlds away.
Where the strange and new have birth.
And Power comes full in play."
This is an old man's deUberate judgment upon the
facts of life. He is content to leave much unex
plained. He is more than content to leave many
things unperfected. But Power and Love — what
do they speU but God? And these remain when
all those things that can be shaken have been
destroyed.

THE BESETTING GOD 257
While Browning's Uterary style is essentially
his own, he lets his characters speak for them
selves, and not for him. They live in their own
times, they are bound by their own conditions,
they do not appear as anachronisms or exotics
upon the scene. They have their own point of
view, and are never mere puppets in a master's
hand. But, in a long succession of poems, this
point of view is one which makes much of God.
With whatever type of character the poet deals,
he is always "sure that God observes"; and he is
sure, too, that God is observed, even by those who
would be glad to close their eyes against Him.
Guido cannot escape from Him. Caliban is forced
to speculate about Him, albeit it must be in a crude,
misshapen way, commensurate with his distorted
form and twisted nature. Hohenstiel Schwangau
believes that God grants to each new man
' "Inter-communication with Himself,
Wreaking on finiteness infinitude."
Francis Furini, the painter-poet, sees token of His
presence in the human form.
"Acquaint you with the body ere your eyes
Look upward: this Andromeda of mine —
17

258 PROPHECY AND POETRY
Gaze on the beauty, Art hangs out for sign
There's finer entertainment underneath.
Learn how they ministrate to life and death —
Those incommensurably marvellous
Contrivances which furnish forth the house
Where soul has sway ! Though Master keep aloof,
Signs of His presence multiply from roof
To basement of the building."
Luria the Moor prefers his own land to Florenccj
and in the praise of his own land he praises God.
"My own East!
How nearer God we were ! He glows above
With scarce an intervention, presses close
And palpitatingly. His soul o'er ours !
We feel Him, nor by painful reason know I
The everlasting minute of creation
Is felt there: now it is, as it was then;
All changes at His instantaneous will,
Not by the operation of a law
Whose maker is elsewhere at other work."
Karshish, the Arab physician, is "not incurious in
God's handiwork." He has traveled to Jerusalem,
and many strange things were brought within the
range of his experience. There were rumors through-

THE BESETTING GOD 259
out the country-side of Vespasian's coming. In the
wUderness, "A black lynx snarled and pricked a tufted ear."
He has had the opportunity of observing new
diseases, and he has heard of new remedies which
he wUl discuss with his friend Abib when they
meet again. Meanwhile, he has talked with Laza
rus, and has heard from Lazarus' own lips the
story of his friendship with Jesus Christ and of
his raising from the dead. He doubts the tale, of
course, and scoffs at it. He apologizes to Abib for
writing to him of such trivial matters, when he
might be teUing of blue-flowering borage, and other
things important to their profession. But even
while he makes light of the story, he cannot get
away from it. If Lazarus is a deceiver,
"Whence has the man the balm that brightens all?"
If Lazarus is mad, his madness is of a most un
common kind; it does not disquiet, but steadies
and strengthens him. That God should dwell on
earth in fashion as a man, and heal the sick, and
raise the dead to life — it altogether passes com
prehension. But if Karshish cannot quite beUeve

26o PROPHECY AND POETRY
it, he pays it at least the tribute of wonder and
amazement, "The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think?
So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too —
So, through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying, ' O heart I made, a heart beats here !
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!
Thou hast no power nor may'st conceive of mine,
But love I gave thee, with myself to love,
And thou must love me who have died for thee!'
The madman saith He said so; it is strange."
These are a few of the men, of all sorts and of
aU conditions, who testify to God in Browning's
pages. Not many of his poems could properly be
caUed religious poems, but they are as much more
reUgious than many professedly reUgious poems as
a godly layman is better than an ignorant and
careless priest. They wear no ecclesiastical cloth
ing, but God is at their heart. This taking of God
for granted, without argument and without apology,
does but add to the impression that is produced of
the inevitableness of His presence in the world.
When Browning goes into metaphysics, whUe he
is subtle and ingenious, we must feel that some-

THE BESETTING GOD 261
thing of his power has been lost. Mere probabUity
can never take the place of knowledge ; and guesses
at truth are a poor substitute for Truth itself, of
which we are so certain that it does not need to
be explained.
But now and then, apart from "Christmas Eve,"
and "Easter Day," and "Saul," and "Rabbi Ben
Ezra," and the magnificent faith of PompiUa and
the Pope, Browning deals with a subject which is
distinctly religious from the start. In "La Saisiaz"
he asks those deep questions about life and im-
mortaUty which are suggested by the sudden death
of a friend, with whom, on the very next day, he
had planned to climb the mountain. He makes
the ascent alone.
"Dared and done; at last I stand upon the summit. Dear and
True!
Singly dared and done • the climbing both of us were bound
to do.
Petty feat and yet prodigious : every side my glance was bent
O'er the grandeur and the beauty lavished through the whole
ascent.
Ledge by ledge, out broke new marvels, now minute and now
immense :
Earth's most exquisite disclosure, heaven's own God in
evidence ! "

262 PROPHECY AND POETRY
Amid the stiUness and the soUtude of those Alpine
peaks, God seems very near. The poem itseU is
argument rather than assertion. Not to every
question is there an answer. Not for every hope
can there be proof. But while there cannot be cer
tainty on every point, while there is room for doubt,
while many a problem must go for a whUe unsolved,
this at any rate the poet would have men say of
him,
"Well? Why he at least believed in Soul, was very sure of
God!"
This is his Holy of Holies into which no doubt can
come. Very different from "La Saisiaz," but Uke it in
the thorough-goingness of its religious motive, is
"A Death in the Desert," in which Browning por
trays the last hours of St, John, There is a power
ful contrast between the bleakness of the physical,
and the splendor of the spiritual world. The old
man Ues in a cave amongst the rocks, whUe four
disciples watch his breath grow faint and fainter.
At any moment there may be rude interruption.
Thieves are abroad, and persecutors, and wild

THE BESETTING GOD 263
beasts. By the mouth of the cave, one of the little
group keeps watch, under pretence of grazing a
goat on rags of various herb which the rocks' shade
just keeps alive.
"Outside, the Bactrian cried his cry.
Like the lone desert -bird that wears the ruff,
As signal we were safe, from time to time."
Then the sick man speaks. He is not conscious of
his weakness. He is not conscious of the dreari
ness of his surroundings. "What do I
See now, suppose you, there where you see rock
Round us?"
He goes back to the time when he was young, when
he had first known Jesus Christ,
"Since I, whom Christ's mouth taught, was bidden teach,
I went for many years about the world,
Saying — 'It was so; so I heard and saw.'"
Now things are changed. There is need of some
thing more than testimony. There is. need of some
thing more than miracle.

264 PROPHECY AND POETRY
"I say that man was made to grow, not stop;
That help, he needed once, and needs no more,
Having grown but an inch by, is withdrawn :
For he hath new needs, and new helps to these.
This imports solely, man should mount on each
New height in view; the help whereby he mounts.
The ladder-rung his foot has left, may fall,
Since all things suffer change save God the Truth."
So, though John dies, and though John be the last
man left on earth who has seen, and touched, and
handled the Word of Life, it does not matter. There
is no further need for seeing of that sort.
"I say, the acknowledgment of God in Christ,
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee
All questions in the earth and out of it."
Life gives to man his chance of the prize of learn
ing love. It gives him too — and to most of us,
with our sins, and failures, and temptations, and
mistakes, the thought must be an eternaUy blessed
one — the chance of coming to know that he is not
complete, that he
" partly is^and wholly hopes to be."
The disciple would say this; and if there be any
thing more that he could say wherein his struggling

THE BESETTING GOD 265
brothers need a hand he would Unger to say it
though he must tarry a new hundred years. But
he was dead.
"Believe ye will not see him any more
About the world with his divine regard !
For all was as I say, and now the man
Lies as he lay once, breast to breast with God."
Browning was writing poetry for almost sixty
years. Few men have had so wide a range of sub
jects, or have produced so great a mass of work.
But there is scarcely one of his important poems
in which, under one aspect or another, God is not
present, not as a mere name, but as One who is
needed to complete the sense. When Browning
wrote "Paracelsus" he was twenty-three. When he
wrote the "Reverie" and the "Epilogue" he was
little short of eighty. But in them aU there is the
same God-consciousness which he possesses above
all our other poets. He began with it. Paracelsus
goes forth upon his quest because he would not
"reject God's great commission." He is sure that
God "Ne'er dooms to waste the strength that He imparts!"

266 PROPHECY AND POETRY
In completed man he sees begin anew a tendency
towards God. This Godward look Browning re
tains when his genius reaches its high-water mark
in "The Ring and the Book." A sordid story is
made to issue in splendid sacrifice, a cowardly crime
brings us presendy to the Pope, one of the noblest
figures in our Uterature. What PompiUa, as she
Ues dying, says of her child, the Utde Ufe that must
be left aU by itseU, shows us the manner in which
Browning was wont to think of God.
"Shall not God stoop the kindlier to His work,
His marvel of creation, foot would crush,
Now that the hand He trusted to receive
And hold it, lets the treasure fall perforce?
The better; He shall have in orphanage
His own way all the clearlier; if my babe
Outlived the hour — and he has lived two weeks —
It is through God who knows I am not by.
Who is it makes the soft gold hair turn black,
And sets the tongue, might he so long at rest,
Trying to talk? Let us leave God alone!
Why should I doubt He will explain in time
What I feel now, but fail to find the words?
My babe nor was, nor is, nor yet shall be
Count Guido Franceschini's child at all-^

THE BESETTING GOD 267
Only his mother's, born of love not hate !
So shall I have my rights in after-time.
It seems absurd, impossible to-day;
So seems so much else, not explained but known ! "
This is Browning's constant attitude — things must
be left with God, When, now and then, he essays
to explain, he becomes very much Uke other people.
But when he teUs of what he sees and knows, he
Ufts us to the loftiest regions of the soul.
We have traced the paraUelism between Isaiah
and Browning in many ways. Their own words
speak for them, and show how close it is. In part,
no doubt, it is due to the towering stature of them
both. Aside from the commonest experiences of
universal humanity, there would be little enough to
connect the Hebrew of the eighth century before
Christ with the EngUshman of the nineteenth cen
tury of the Christian era; but as men cUmb the
mountain they must draw near each other, and
when one passes above Isaiah or above Browning
there is not far to go. In part, again, their Ukeness
is due to the intense reUgious nature of them both.
Whatever may be the differences that keep men
apart, God does not change, and those- who are

268 PROPHECY AND POETRY
concerned with Him possess a common meeting-
ground which distance of place and time, or pecu
liarities of race and environment, or the multitu
dinous conditions which come and go as the world
goes on its way, are powerless to destroy. But more
than aU we may account for the closeness of their
thought from the fact that each, from his own high
place, looks over towards the other's station. Proph
ecy has a sanction to which the very highest poetry
makes no claim. But when John Keble spoke of
the poets as "heirs of more than royal race," he
spoke weU. They show us the power of the mind,
the reach of the loving heart, the depths of the
awakened soul. They point out an avenue of es
cape from those sordid cares, those petty half-
interests, those besetting trifles, of which none of
us are without experience. There is nothing more
real than those things with which the noblest poetry
deals. It shows us, not from without but from
within, not as a monitor but as a loving counsellor,
what we might be, what we ought to be. It does
its work of renewal and refreshing in the soul when
the fire and the earthquake and the whirlwind
might come and go in vain. It tinges the clouds

THE BESETTING GOD 269
that gather about Ufe with an unearthly glory. It
makes humanity nobler, our friends dearer, our
joys keener, our griefs more sacred. It even seems
as if it made God nearer than He was before.
Prophecy speaks often with a sterner and more in
sistent voice. It has the right, not only to speak to
men of God, but to speak for God. It stirs the con
science, as poetry moves the heart. While Isaiah
was the greatest of the prophets, more than any of
his feUow-prophets he was a poet ; and while Brown
ing was a poet of the first order, the prophetic spirit
is constantly present in his work.

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