the critical intellect in slumber, sets the soul free to rise on the
wings of religious faith. But reason breaks the spell; and the world of
poetry, and religion--a world which to them is always beautiful and good
with God's presence--becomes a system of inexorable laws, dead,
mechanical, explicable in strict truth, as an equipoise of constantly
changing forms of energy.

There is, at the present time, a widespread belief that we had better
keep poetry and religion beyond the reach of critical investigation, if
we set any store by them. Faith and reason are thought to be finally
divorced. It is an article of the common creed that every attempt which
the world has made to bring them together has resulted in denial, or at
the best in doubt, regarding all supersensuous facts. The one condition
of leading a full life, of maintaining a living relation between
ourselves and both the spiritual and material elements of our existence,
is to make our lives an alternating rhythm of the head and heart, to
distinguish with absolute clearness between the realm of reason and that
of faith.

Now, such an assumption would be fatal to any attempt like the present,
to find truth in poetry; and I must, therefore, try to meet it before
entering upon a statement and criticism of Browning's view of life. I
cannot admit that the difficulties of placing the facts of man's
spiritual life on a rational basis are so great as to justify the
assertion that there is no such basis, or that it is not discoverable by
man. Surely, it is unreasonable to make intellectual death the condition
of spiritual life. If such a condition were imposed on man, it must
inevitably defeat its own purpose; for man cannot possibly continue to
live a divided life, and persist in believing that for which his reason
knows no defence. We must, in the long run, either rationalize our faith