and character. His sense of an ever-victorious Righteousness at the
centre of the universe, whom one might always trust and be untroubled,
was Jewish, but he carried it forward with the New Testament and made
the Righteousness identical with absolute Love. Yet, even in this, the
Old Testament elements were more plainly seen than is usual among
Christians. The appearance of Christ as all-conquering love in
_Easter-Day_ and the scenery which surrounds him are such as Ezekiel
might have conceived and written. Then his intellectual subtlety, the
metaphysical minuteness of his arguments, his fondness for parenthesis,
the way in which he pursued the absolute while he loaded it with a host
of relatives, and conceived the universal through a multitude of
particulars, the love he had for remote and unexpected analogies, the
craft with which his intellect persuaded him that he could insert into
his poems thoughts, illustrations, legends, and twisted knots of
reasoning which a fine artistic sense would have omitted, were all as
Jewish as the Talmud. There was also a Jewish quality in his natural
description, in the way he invented diverse phrases to express different
aspects of the same phenomenon, a thing for which the Jews were famous;
and in the way in which he peopled what he described with animal life of
all kinds, another remarkable habit of the Jewish poets. Moreover, his
pleasure in intense colour, in splashes and blots of scarlet and crimson
and deep blue and glowing green; in precious stones for the sake of
their colour--sapphire, ruby, emerald, chrysolite, pearl, onyx,
chalcedony (he does not care for the diamond); in the flame of gold, in
the crimson of blood, is Jewish. So also is his love of music, of music
especially as bringing us nearest to what is ineffable in God, of music
with human aspiration in its heart and sounding in its phrases. It was
this Jewish element in Browning, in all its many forms, which caused him
to feel with and to write so much about the Jews in his poetry. The two
poems in which he most fully enshrines his view of human life, as it may