positive--those momentary intuitions of things which eye hath not seen
nor ear heard. The needs of the highest parts of our humanity cannot
be supplied by ascertained truth, in which we might rest, or which we
might put to use for definite ends; rather by ventures of faith, which
test the courage of the soul, we ascend from surmise to assurance, and
so again to higher surmise.--Condensed from EDWARD DOWDEN, _Studies
in Literature_.

... Browning has not cared for that poetic form which bestows
perennial charm, or else he was incapable of it. He fails in beauty,
in concentration of interest, in economy of language, in selection of
the best from the common treasure of experience. In those works where
he has been most indifferent, as in the _Red Cotton Night-Cap
Country_, he has been merely whimsical and dull; in those works
where the genius he possessed is most felt, as in _Saul_, _A Toccata
of Galuppi's_, _Rabbi Ben Ezra_, _The Flight of the Duchess_, _The Bishop
Orders his Tomb in Saint Praxed's Church_, _Hervé Riel_, _Cavalier Tunes_,
_Time's Revenges_, and many more, he achieves beauty, or nobility,
or fitness of phrase such as only a poet is capable of. It is in these
last pieces and their like that his fame lies for the future. It
was his lot to be strong as the thinker, the moralist, with "the
accomplishment of verse," the scholar interested to rebuild the past
of experience, the teacher with an explicit dogma in an intellectual
form with examples from life, the anatomist of human passions,
instincts, and impulses in all their gamut, the commentator on his own
age; he was weak as the artist, often unnecessarily and by choice, in
the repulsive form,--in the awkward, the obscure, the ugly. He belongs
with Jonson, with Dryden, with the heirs of the masculine intellect,
the men of power not unvisited by grace, but in whom mind is
predominant. Upon the work of such poets time hesitates, conscious