"shows aright
The secret of a sunbeam, breaks its light
Into the jewelled bow from blankest white."[128]

[Footnote 128: _Deaf and Dumb_.]

We have now to watch Browning's efforts to interpret this profound and
intimate persuasion of his in terms of the various conceptions at his
disposal.[129]

[Footnote 129: On the matter of this section cf. Mr A.C. Pigou's acute
and lucid discussions, _Browning as a Religious Teacher_, ch. viii. and
ix.]


III.


Beside the soul, there was something else that "stood sure" for
Browning--namely, God. Here, too, a theological dogma, steeped in his
ardent mind, acquired a new potency for the imagination, and a more
vital nexus with man and nature than any other poet of the century had
given it. And here, too, the mystic and the positive strains of
Browning's genius wrought together, impressing themselves equally in
that wonderful Browningesque universe in which every germ seems to be
itself a universe "needing but a look to burst into immense life," and
infinity is ever at hand, behind a closed door. The whole of his
theology was an attempt to express consistently two convictions, rarely
found of the same intensity in the same brain, of the divineness of the
universe and the individuality of man.