he has taken for a worthier stage, the soul itself,
its shifting fancies and celestial lights, more than any other poet
of the age. And he has worked with a thought-and-passion capital
greater than the combined thought-and-passion capital of the richest
of his poetical contemporaries. And he has thought nobly of the soul,
and has treated it as, in its essence, above the fixed and law-bound
system of things which we call nature; in other words,
he has treated it as supernatural. "Mind," he makes the Pope say,
in `The Ring and the Book', -- and his poetry bears testimony to
its being his own conviction and doctrine, -- "Mind is not matter,
nor from matter, but above." With every student of Browning,
the recognition and acceptance of this must be his starting-point.
Even that which impelled the old dog, in his poem entitled `Tray'
(`Dramatic Lyrics', First Series), to rescue the beggar child
that fell into the river, and then to dive after the child's doll,
and bring it up, after a long stay under water, the poet evidently
distinguishes from matter, -- regards as "not matter nor from matter,
but above": --

"And so, amid the laughter gay,
Trotted my hero off, -- old Tray, --
Till somebody, prerogatived
With reason, reasoned: `Why he dived,
His brain would show us, I should say.

`John, go and catch -- or, if needs be,
Purchase that animal for me!
By vivisection, at expense
Of half-an-hour and eighteen pence,
How brain secretes dog's soul, we'll see!"