thick and plain with spires, and, like a ghost disshrouded,
white the sea. SO MAY THE TRUTH BE FLASHED OUT BY ONE BLOW,
AND GUIDO SEE, ONE INSTANT, AND BE SAVED. Else I avert my face,
nor follow him into that sad obscure sequestered state
where God UNMAKES BUT TO REMAKE the soul he else made first in vain;
which must not be. Enough, for I may die this very night:
and how should I dare die, this man let live? Carry this forthwith
to the Governor!"

Browning is the most essentially Christian of living poets.
Though he rarely speaks `in propria persona' in his poetry,
any one who has gone over it all, can have no doubt as to his own
most vital beliefs. What the Beauty-loving Soul in Tennyson's
`Palace of Art' say of herself, cannot be suspected even,
of Browning: --

"I take possession of man's mind and deed.
I care not what the sects may brawl.
I sit as God holding no form of creed,
But contemplating all."

Religion with him is, indeed, the all-in-all; but not any
particular form of it as a finality. This is not a world
for finalities of any kind, as he constantly teaches us:
it is a world of broken arcs, not of perfect rounds.
Formulations of some kind he would, no doubt, admit there must be,
as in everything else; but with him all formulations and tabulations
of beliefs, especially such as "make square to a finite eye
the circle of infinity", *1* are, at the best, only PROVISIONAL,
and, at the worst, lead to spiritual standstill, spiritual torpor,