feelings.  The hem of Christ’s robe passes wholly at this point from the hand of the seer of visions in his poem.  One best way of worship there needs must be; ours may indeed not be the absolutely best, but it is our part, it is our probation to see that we strive earnestly after what is best; yes, and strive with might and main to confer upon our fellows the gains which we have found.  It may be God’s part—­we trust it is—­to bring all wanderers to the one fold at last.  As for us, we must seek after Him and find Him in the mode required by our highest thought, our purest passion.  Here Browning speaks from his central feeling.  Only, we may ask, what if one’s truest self lie somewhere hidden amid a thousand hesitating sympathies?  And is not the world spacious enough to include a Montaigne as well as a Pascal or a Browning?  Assuredly the world without its Montaigne would be a poorer and a less hospitable dwelling-place for the spirits of men.

Mrs Browning complained to her husband of what she terms the asceticism of Easter Day, the second part of his volume of 1850; his reply was that it stated “one side of the question.”  “Don’t think,” Mrs Browning says, “that he has taken to the cilix—­indeed he has not—­but it is his way to see things as passionately as other people feel them.” Easter Day has nothing to say of religious life in Churches and societies, nothing of the communities of public worship.  For the writer of this poem only three things exist—­God, the individual soul, and the world regarded as the testing place and training place of the soul.  Browning has here a rigour of moral or spiritual earnestness which may be called, by any one who so pleases, Puritan in its kind and its intensity; he feels the need, if we are to attain any approximation to the Christian ideal, of the lit lamp and the girt loin.  Two difficulties in the Christian life in particular he chooses to consider—­first, the difficulty of faith in the things of the spirit, and especially in what he regards as the essential parts of the Christian story; and secondly, the difficulty of obeying the injunction to renounce the world.  That we cannot grow to our highest attainment by the old method enjoined by pagan philosophy—­that of living according to nature, he regards as evident, for nature itself is warped and marred; it groans and travails, and from its discords how shall we frame a harmony?  It was always his habit of mind, he tells us, from his childhood onwards, to face a danger and confront a doubt, and if there were anywhere a lurking fear, to draw this forth from its hiding-place and examine it in the light, even at the risk of some mortal ill.  Therefore he will press for an answer to his present questionings; he will try conclusions to the uttermost.