Ruskin has made it plain how necessary is that tone of mind which is religious to the best work in art.  His own faith has been earnest and strong in the reality of the spiritual.  Realist as he is in art, he believes in the original and creative power of the mind, and his work has all taken on a higher spirit and a finer expression because of his religious convictions.  Writing in Modern Painters of man as made in the image of God, he answers the objection which is raised to the idea that all the revelation man has is contained in a being so imperfect.

“No other book, nor fragment of book, than that, will you ever find,—­nothing in the clouds above, nor in the earth beneath.  The flesh-bound volume is the only revelation that is, that was, or that can be.  In that is the image of God painted; in that is the law of God written; in that is the promise of God revealed.  Know thyself; for through thyself only thou canst know God.  Through the glass, darkly; but except through the glass, in no wise.  A tremulous crystal, waved as water, poured out upon the ground;—­you may defile it, despise it, pollute it at your pleasure and at your peril; for on the peace of those weak waves must all the heaven you shall ever gain be first seen; and through such purity as you can win for those dark waves must all the light of the risen Sun of Righteousness be bent down by faint refraction.  Cleanse them, and calm them, as you love your life.  Therefore it is that all the power of nature depends on subjection to the human soul.  Man is the Sun of the world; more than the real sun.  The fire of his wonderful heart is the only light and heat worth gauge or measure.  Where he is, are the tropics; where he is not, the ice-world.”

Such words may not be scientific, but they convey real meaning.  Their assertion that the world is to be tested and understood by man, not man by the world, is one worthy of attention.  The conviction of this truth has a literary power and incentive not to be found in “the scientific method” or any of its corollaries.

To this group of writers may be added Mrs. Browning, who, as a poet, did great and lasting work.  Its value, in large measure, rests on its depth of spiritual conviction, and on its idealism in purpose and spirit.  Her conception of love is finer and truer than George Eliot’s, because she gave it an ideal as well as an altruistic meaning; because she thought it has an eternal as well as a social significance.  As a poet she lost nothing of charm or of power or of inspiration because she could herself believe, with simple trust, what she has embodied in “A Child’s Thought of God.”

  “God is so good, He wears a fold
    Of heaven and earth across his face—­
  Like secrets kept, for love, untold. 
    But still I feel that his embrace
  Slides down by thrills, through all things made,
    Through sight and sound of every place.”

That art is to be nothing more than a copying and interpretation of nature Mrs. Browning did not believe.  In Aurora Leigh she says,—­