the senses, for the belief in their illusoriness easily to hold its
ground. This "infinite soul" palpably had its fullest and richest
existence in the very heart of finite things. Wordsworth had turned for
"intimations of immortality" to the remembered intuitions of childhood;
Browning found them in every pang of baffled aspiration and frustrate
will. Hence there arose in the very midst of this realm of illusion a
new centre of reality; the phantoms took on solid and irrefragable
existence, and refused to take to flight when the cock-crow announced
that "Time was done, Eternity begun."

Body and Time had in general too strong a grip upon him to be resolved
into illusion. His actual pictures of departed souls suggest a state
very unlike that reversion of the infinite spirit which had been thrust
upon Matter and distended in Time, to the timeless Infinitude it had
forgone. It does not escape from Time, but only passes on from the
limited section of Time known as life, into another section, without
limit, known as Eternity. And if it escapes from Body, at least Browning
represents his departed soul more boldly than any other modern poet in a
garb of flesh. Evelyn Hope, when she wakens in another world, will find
her unknown lover's leaf in her hand, and "remember, and understand."

And just as Matter and Time invade Browning's spiritual eternity, so his
ideal of conduct for man while still struggling with finite conditions
casts its shadow on to the state of immortal release. Two conceptions,
in fact, of the life after death, corresponding to divergent aspects of
his thought, contend in Browning's mind. Now it is a state of
emancipation from earthly limits,--when the "broken arcs" become
"perfect rounds" and "evil" is transformed into "so much good more," and
"reward and repose" succeed the "struggles"[125] by which they have been
won. But at times he startles the devout reader by foreshadowing not a