[Footnote 124:  Fifine at the Fair.]

But there were, as has been said, elements in Browning’s mental make which kept this abstract and formal theory, fortified though it was by theological prepossessions, in check.  His most intense consciousness, his most definite grip upon reality, was too closely bound up with the collisions and jostlings, the limits and angularities, of the world of the senses, for the belief in their illusoriness easily to hold its ground.  This “infinite soul” palpably had its fullest and richest existence in the very heart of finite things.  Wordsworth had turned for “intimations of immortality” to the remembered intuitions of childhood; Browning found them in every pang of baffled aspiration and frustrate will.  Hence there arose in the very midst of this realm of illusion a new centre of reality; the phantoms took on solid and irrefragable existence, and refused to take to flight when the cock-crow announced that “Time was done, Eternity begun.”

Body and Time had in general too strong a grip upon him to be resolved into illusion.  His actual pictures of departed souls suggest a state very unlike that reversion of the infinite spirit which had been thrust upon Matter and distended in Time, to the timeless Infinitude it had forgone.  It does not escape from Time, but only passes on from the limited section of Time known as life, into another section, without limit, known as Eternity.  And if it escapes from Body, at least Browning represents his departed soul more boldly than any other modern poet in a garb of flesh.  Evelyn Hope, when she wakens in another world, will find her unknown lover’s leaf in her hand, and “remember, and understand.”

And just as Matter and Time invade Browning’s spiritual eternity, so his ideal of conduct for man while still struggling with finite conditions casts its shadow on to the state of immortal release.  Two conceptions, in fact, of the life after death, corresponding to divergent aspects of his thought, contend in Browning’s mind.  Now it is a state of emancipation from earthly limits,—­when the “broken arcs” become “perfect rounds” and “evil” is transformed into “so much good more,” and “reward and repose” succeed the “struggles"[125] by which they have been won.  But at times he startles the devout reader by foreshadowing not a sudden transformation but a continuation of the slow educative process of earth in a succession of preliminary heavens before the consummate state is reached.  “Progress,” in short, was too deeply ingrained in Browning’s conception of what was ultimately good, and therefore ultimately real, not to find entrance into his heaven, were it only by some casual backdoor of involuntary intuition.  Even in that more gracious state “achievement lacked a gracious somewhat"[126] to his indomitable fighting instinct.

[Footnote 125:  Saul, xvii.]

[Footnote 126:  One Word More.]

     “Soul resteth not, and mine must still advance,”