[Footnote A: _Christmas-Eve_.]

Nowhere in Browning, unless we except _Paracelsus_, is there any sign of
an inclination to treat man's knowledge in the same spirit as he deals
with man's love--namely, as a direct emanation from the inmost nature of
God, a divine element that completes and crowns man's life on earth. On
the contrary, he shows a persistent tendency to treat love as a power
higher in nature than reason, and to give to it a supreme place in the
formation of character; and, as he grows older, that tendency grows in
strength. The philosophical poems, in which love is made all in all, and
knowledge is reduced to nescience follow by logical evolution from
principles, the influence of which we can detect even in his earlier
works. Still, in the latter, these principles are only latent, and are
far from holding undisputed sway. Browning was, at first, restrained
from exclusive devotion to abstract views, by the suggestions which the
artistic spirit receives through its immediate contact with the facts of
life. That contact it is very difficult for philosophy to maintain as it
pursues its effort after universal truth. Philosophy is obliged to
analyze in order to define, and, in that process, it is apt to lose
something of that completeness of representation, which belongs to art.
For art is always engaged in presenting the universal in the form of a
particular object of beauty. Its product is a "known unknown," but the
unknown is the unexhausted reality of a fact of intuition. Nor can
analysis ever exhaust it; theory can never catch up art, or explain all
that is in it. On similar grounds, it may be shown that it is impossible
for reason to lay bare all the elements that enter into its first
complex product, which we call faith. In religion, as in art, man is
aware of more than he knows; his articulate logic cannot do justice to
all the truths of the "heart." "The supplementary reflux of light" of