grasps of guess
    Which pull the more into the less,

is lost.  And as to earth’s best possession—­love—­had he ever made a discovery through human love of that which it forthshadows—­the love that is perfect and divine?  Earth is no longer earth to the doomed man, but the star of the god Rephan of which we read in one of Browning’s latest poems; in the horror of its blank and passionless uniformity, untroubled by any spiritual presences, he cowers at the Judge’s feet, and prays for darkness, hunger, toil, distress, if only hope be also granted him: 

Then did the form expand, expand—­ knew Him through the dread disguise As the whole God within his eyes Embraced me.

The Doomsman has in a moment become the Saviour.  In all this, if Browning has the burden of a prophecy to utter, he utters it, after the manner of earlier prophets, as a vision.  His art is sensuous and passionate; his argument is transformed into a series of imaginative experiences.

Mrs. Browning’s illness during the summer and early autumn of 1850 left her for a time more shaken in health than she had been since her marriage.  But by the spring of the following year she had recovered strength; and designs of travel were formed, which should include Rome, North Italy, Switzerland, the Rhine, Brussels, Paris and London.  Almost at the moment of starting for Rome at the end of April, the plans were altered; the season was too far advanced for going south; ways and means must be economised; Rome might be postponed for a future visit; and Venice would make amends for the present sacrifice.  And Venice in May and early June did indeed for a time make amends.  “I have been between heaven and earth,” Mrs. Browning wrote, “since our arrival at Venice.”  The rich architecture, the colour, the moonlight, the music, the enchanting silence made up a unity of pleasures like nothing that she had previously known.  When evening came she and her husband would follow the opera from their box hired for “two shillings and eightpence English,” or sit under the moon in the piazza of St Mark sipping coffee and reading the French papers.  But as the month went by, Browning lost appetite and lost sleep.  The “soothing, lulling, rocking atmosphere” which suited Mrs. Browning made him, after the first excitement of delight, grow nervous and dispirited.  They hastened away to Padua, drove to Arqua, “for Petrarch’s sake,” passed through Brescia in a flood of white moonlight, and having reached Milan climbed—­the invalid of Wimpole Street and her husband—­to the topmost point of the cathedral.  From the Italian lakes they crossed by the St Gothard to Switzerland, and omitting part of their original scheme of wandering, journeyed in twenty-four hours without stopping from Strasburg to Paris.