man “cultivated his plot,"[132] managing independently as he might the business of his soul.  The divine love might wind inextricably about him,[133] the dance of plastic circumstance at the divine bidding impress its rhythms upon his life,[134] he retained his human identity inviolate, a “point of central rock” amid the welter of the waves.[135] His love might be a “spark from God’s fire,” but it was his own, to use as he would; he “stood on his own stock of love and power."[136]

[Footnote 131:  Christmas-Eve.]

[Footnote 132:  Ferishtah.]

[Footnote 133:  Easter-Day.]

[Footnote 134:  Rabbi ben Ezra.]

[Footnote 135:  Epilogue.]

[Footnote 136:  Christmas-Eve.]

IV.

In this sharp demarcation of man’s being from God’s, Browning never faltered.  On the contrary, the individualising animus which there found expression impelled him to raise more formidable barriers about man, and to turn the ring-fence which secured him from intrusion into a high wall which cut off his view.  In other words, the main current of Browning’s thought sets strongly towards a sceptical criticism of human knowledge.  At the outset he stands on the high a priori ground of Plato.  Truth in its fulness abides in the soul, an “imprisoned splendour,” which intellect quickened by love can elicit, which moments of peculiar insight, deep joy, and sorrow, and the coming on of death, can release.  But the gross flesh hems it in, wall upon wall, “a baffling and perverting carnal mesh,"[137] the source of all error.  The process of discovery he commonly conceived as an advance through a succession of Protean disguises of truth, each “one grade above its last presentment,"[138] until, at the rare moment, by the excepted eye, the naked truth was grasped.  But Browning became steadily more reluctant to admit that these fortunate moments ever occurred, that the Proteus was ever caught.  Things would be known to the soul as they were known to God only when it was emancipated by death.  Infinity receded into an ever more inaccessible remoteness from the finite.  For the speaker in Christmas-Eve man’s mind was the image of God’s, reflecting trace for trace his absolute knowledge; for Francis Furini the bare fact of his own existence is all he knows, a narrow rock-spit of knowledge enisled in a trackless ocean of ignorance.  Thus for Browning, in differing moods and contexts, the mind of man becomes now a transparent pane, opening directly upon the truth as God sees it, now a coloured lens, presenting truth in blurred refraction, now an opaque mirror idly bodying forth his futile and illusive dreams.

[Footnote 137:  Paracelsus.]

[Footnote 138:  Fifine, cxxiv.]