And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,

* * * * *

Buries us with a glory, young once more,
Pouring heaven into this shut house of life.

--_Transcendentalism_.


I.


"I have, you are to know," Browning once wrote to Miss Haworth, "such a
love for flowers and leaves ... that I every now and then in an
impatience at being unable to possess them thoroughly, to see them
quite, satiate myself with their scent,--bite them to bits." "All
poetry," he wrote some twenty years later to Ruskin, "is the problem of
putting the infinite into the finite." Utterances like these, not
conveyed through the lips of some "dramatic" creation, but written
seriously in his own person to intimate friends, give us a clue more
valuable it may be than some other utterances which are oftener quoted
and better known, to the germinal impulses of Browning's poetic work.
"Finite" and "infinite" were words continually on his lips, and it is
clear that both sides of the antithesis represented instincts rooted in
his mental nature, drawing nourishment from distinct but equally
fundamental springs of feeling and thought. Each had its stronghold in a
particular psychical region. The province and feeding-ground of his
passion for "infinity" was that eager and restless self-consciousness
which he so vividly described in _Pauline_, seeking to "be all, have,