philosophy cannot "illustrate all the inferior grades" of knowledge. Man
will never completely understand himself.

"I knew, I felt, (perception unexpressed,
Uncomprehended by our narrow thought,
But somehow felt and known in every shift
And change in the spirit,--nay, in every pore
Of the body, even,)--what God is, what we are,
What life is--how God tastes an infinite joy
In infinite ways--one everlasting bliss,
From whom all being emanates, all power
Proceeds."[A]

[Footnote A: _Paracelsus_.]

I believe that it is possible, by the help of the intuitions of
Browning's highest artistic period, to bring together again the elements
of his broken faith, and to find in them suggestions of a truer
philosophy of life than anything which the poet himself achieved.
Perhaps, indeed, it is not easy, nor altogether fair, to press the
passionate utterances of his religious rapture into the service of
metaphysics, and to treat the unmeasured language of emotion as the
expression of a definite doctrine. Nevertheless, rather than set forth a
new defence of the faith, which his agnosticism left exposed to the
assaults of doubt and denial, it is better to make Browning correct his
own errors, and to appeal from the metaphysician to the poet, from the
sobriety of the logical understanding to the inspiration of poetry.

I have already indicated what seems to me to be the defective element in
the poet's philosophy of life. His theory of knowledge is in need of