Early in 1853 Mrs Browning became much interested in the reports which reached her—­many of these from America—­of the “rapping spirits,” who in the ’fifties were busy in instructing chairs and tables to walk in the way they should not go.  “You know I am rather a visionary,” she wrote to Miss Mitford, “and inclined to knock round at all the doors of the present world to try to get out.”  Her Swedenborgian studies had prepared her to believe that there were communities of life in the visible and the invisible worlds which did not permit of the one being wholly estranged from the other.  A clever person who loves the marvellous will soon find by the sheer force of logic that marvels are the most natural things in the world.  Should we not credit human testimony?  Should we not evict prejudice from our understandings?  Should we not investigate alleged facts?  Should we not keep an open mind?  We cannot but feel a certain sympathy with a woman of ardent nature who fails to observe the bounds of intellectual prudence.  Browning himself with all his audacities was pre-eminently prudent.  He did not actively enter into politics; he did not dabble in pseudo-science; he was an artist and a thinker; and he made poems, and amused himself with drawing, modelling in clay, and the study of music.  Mrs Browning squandered her enthusiasms with less discretion.  A good dose of stupidity or an indignant energy of common-sense, impatient of the nonsense of the thing, may be the salvation of the average man.  It is often the clever people who would be entirely rational and unprejudiced that best succeed in duping themselves at once by their reason and their folly.  A fine old crusted prejudice commonly stands for a thousand acts of judgment amassed into a convenient working result; a single act of an individual understanding, or several of such acts, will seldom contain an equal sum of wisdom.  Scientific discovery is not advanced by a multitude of curious and ingenious amateurs in learned folly.  Whether the claims of spiritualism are warrantable or fallacious, Mrs Browning, gifted as she was with rare powers of mind, was not qualified to investigate those claims; it was a waste of energy, from which she could not but suffer serious risks and certain loss.

Before she had seen anything for herself she was a believer—­a believer, as she describes it, on testimony.  The fact of communication with the invisible world appeared to her more important than anything that had been communicated.  The spirits themselves “seem abundantly foolish, one must admit.”  Yet it was clear to her that mankind was being prepared for some great development of truth.  She would keep her eyes wide open to facts and her soul lifted up in reverential expectation.  By-and-by she felt the dumb wood of the table panting and shivering with human emotion.  The dogmatism of Faraday in an inadequate theory was simply unscientific, a piece of intellectual tyranny.  The American medium