the individual knows nothing of the Divine scheme, he _is_ everything in
it.

This faith in personality is naturally abstruse on the metaphysical
side, but it is always picturesque on the dramatic; for it issues in
that love of the unusual which is so striking to every reader of Mr.
Browning's works; and we might characterize these in a few words, by
saying that they reflect at once the extent of his general sympathies,
and his antagonism to everything which is general. But the "unusual"
which attracts him is not the morbid or the monstrous, for these mean
defective life. It is every healthy escape from the conventional and the
commonplace, which are also defective life; and this is why we find in
his men and women those vivid, various, and subtly compounded motives
and feelings, which make our contact with them a slight, but continuous
electric shock.

And since the belief in personality is the belief in human life in its
fullest and truest form, it includes the belief in love and
self-sacrifice. It may, indeed, be said that while Mr. Browning's
judgments are leavened by the one idea, they are steadily coloured by
the other; this again being so evident to his serious renders that I
need only indicate it here. But the love of love does more than colour
his views of life; it is an essential element in his theology; and it
converts what would otherwise be a pure Theism into a mystical
Christianity which again is limited by his rejection of all dogmatic
religious truth. I have already alluded to his belief that, though the
Deity is not to be invested with human emotions, He can only be reached
through them. Love, according to him, is the necessary channel; since a
colourless Omnipotence is outside the conception as outside the
sympathies of man. Christ is a message of Divine love, indispensable and