[Footnote 129:  On the matter of this section cf.  Mr A.C.  Pigou’s acute and lucid discussions, Browning as a Religious Teacher, ch. viii. and ix.]

III.

Beside the soul, there was something else that “stood sure” for Browning—­namely, God.  Here, too, a theological dogma, steeped in his ardent mind, acquired a new potency for the imagination, and a more vital nexus with man and nature than any other poet of the century had given it.  And here, too, the mystic and the positive strains of Browning’s genius wrought together, impressing themselves equally in that wonderful Browningesque universe in which every germ seems to be itself a universe “needing but a look to burst into immense life,” and infinity is ever at hand, behind a closed door.  The whole of his theology was an attempt to express consistently two convictions, rarely found of the same intensity in the same brain, of the divineness of the universe and the individuality of man.

The mechanical Creator of Paley and the deists could never have satisfied him.  From the first he “saw God everywhere.”  There was in him the stuff of which the “God-intoxicated” men are made, and he had moments, like that expressed in one of his most deliberate and emphatic personal utterances, in which all existence seemed to be the visible Face of God—­

     “Become my universe that feels and knows."[130]

[Footnote 130:  Epilogue.]

He clearly strained towards the sublime pantheistic imaginings of the great poets of the previous generation,—­Wordsworth’s “Something far more deeply interfused,” Shelley’s “One spirit’s plastic stress,” and Goethe’s Erdgeist, who weaves the eternal vesture of God at the loom of Time.  The dying vision of Paracelsus is as sublime as these, and marks Browning’s nearest point of approach to the ways of thought they embody.  In all the vitalities of the world, from the uncouth play of the volcano to the heaven-and-earth transfiguring mind of man, God was present, sharing their joy.  But even here the psychological barrier is apparent, against which all the surge of pantheistic impulse in Browning broke in vain.  This God of manifold joys was sharply detached from his universe; he was a sensitive and sympathetic spectator, not a pervading spirit.  In every direction human personality opposed rigid frontiers which even the infinite God could not pass, and no poet less needed the stern warning which he addressed to German speculation against the “gigantic stumble"[131] of making them one.  The mystic’s dream of seeing all things in God, the Hegelian thesis of a divine mind realising itself in and through the human, found no lodgment in a consciousness of mosaic-like clearness dominated by the image of an incisively individual and indivisible self.  In later life the sharp lines which he drew from the first about individual personality became a ring-fence within which each