to turn the ring-fence which secured him from intrusion into a high wall
which cut off his view. In other words, the main current of Browning's
thought sets strongly towards a sceptical criticism of human knowledge.
At the outset he stands on the high _à priori_ ground of Plato. Truth in
its fulness abides in the soul, an "imprisoned splendour," which
intellect quickened by love can elicit, which moments of peculiar
insight, deep joy, and sorrow, and the coming on of death, can release.
But the gross flesh hems it in, wall upon wall, "a baffling and
perverting carnal mesh,"[137] the source of all error. The process of
discovery he commonly conceived as an advance through a succession of
Protean disguises of truth, each "one grade above its last
presentment,"[138] until, at the rare moment, by the excepted eye, the
naked truth was grasped. But Browning became steadily more reluctant to
admit that these fortunate moments ever occurred, that the Proteus was
ever caught. Things would be known to the soul as they were known to God
only when it was emancipated by death. Infinity receded into an ever
more inaccessible remoteness from the finite. For the speaker in
_Christmas-Eve_ man's mind was the image of God's, reflecting trace for
trace his absolute knowledge; for Francis Furini the bare fact of his
own existence is all he knows, a narrow rock-spit of knowledge enisled
in a trackless ocean of ignorance. Thus for Browning, in differing moods
and contexts, the mind of man becomes now a transparent pane, opening
directly upon the truth as God sees it, now a coloured lens, presenting
truth in blurred refraction, now an opaque mirror idly bodying forth his
futile and illusive dreams.

[Footnote 137: _Paracelsus_.]

[Footnote 138: _Fifine_, cxxiv.]