and even his central convictions, his working creed of life, can with no sense of uncertainty be gathered from them.  To attribute to the writer the opinions and the feelings of his dramatis personae would of course be the crudest of mistakes.  But when an idea persists through many poems written at various times and seasons, when it appears and reappears under various clothings of circumstance, when it is employed as if it had a crucial value, when it becomes a test or touchstone of character, we cannot doubt that it is an intimate possession of the writer’s mind.  Such an idea is not a mere playmate but rather a confidant.  When, again, after a tangle of casuistic reasoning or an embroilment of contending feelings, some idea suddenly flashes forth, and like a sword sunders truth from falsehood and darkness from light, we may be assured that it has more than a dramatic value.  And, once more, if again and again the same idea shows its power over the feelings and inspires elevated lyrical utterance, or if in pieces of casuistical brain-work it enters as a passionate element and domineers by its own authority, if it originates not debate but song or that from which song is made, we know that the writer’s heart has embraced it as a truth of the emotions.

Because Browning had his own well-defined view of truth, he could confidently lend his mind away to his fifty or his hundred men and women.  They served to give his ideas a concrete body.  By sympathy and by intelligence he widened the basis of his own existence.  If the poet loses himself to find himself again through sympathy with external nature, how much more and in how many enriching ways through sympathy with humanity!  Thus new combinations of thought and feeling are effected.  Thus a kind of experiment is made with our own ideas by watching how they behave when brought into connection with these new combinations.  Truth is relative, and the best truth of our own is worth testing under various conditions and circumstances.  The truth or falsehood which is not our own has a right to say the best for itself that can be said.  Let truth and falsehood grapple.  Let us hear the counter-truth or the rival falsehood which is the complement or the criticism of our own, and hear it stated with the utmost skill.  A Luther would surely be the wiser for an evening spent in company with a Blougram; and Blougram has things to tell us which Luther never knew.  But precisely because truth is relative we must finally adhere to our own perceptions; they constitute the light for us; and the justice we would do to others we must also render to ourselves.  A wide survey may be made from a fixed centre.  “Universal sympathies,” Miss Barrett wrote in one of the letters to her future husband, “cannot make a man inconsistent, but on the contrary sublimely consistent.  A church tower may stand between the mountains and the sea, looking to either, and stand fast:  but the willow tree at the gable-end blown now toward the north and now toward the south, while its natural leaning is due east or west, is different altogether ... as different as a willow tree from a church tower."[63]