matter it conveyed. Abrupt demarcations cut off soul from body, and man
from God; the infinite habitually presented itself to him as something,
not transcending and comprehending the finite, but _beginning where the
finite stopped_,--Eternity at the end of Time. But the same imaginative
passion for form which imposed some concrete limitations upon the
Absolute deprived it also of the vagueness of abstraction. Browning's
divinity is very finite, but also amazingly real and near; not
"interfused" with the world, which is full of stubborn distinctness, but
permeating it through and through, "curled inextricably round about" all
its beauty and its power,[92] "intertwined" with earth's lowliest
existence, and thrilling with answering rapture to every throb of life.
The doctrine of God's "immanence" was almost a commonplace with
Browning's generation. Browning turned the doctrine into imaginative
speech equalled in impressiveness by that of Carlyle and by that of
Emerson, but distinguished from both by an eager articulating concrete
sensibility which lifts into touch with supreme Good all the
labyrinthine multiplicity of existence which Carlyle impatiently
suppressed, while it joyously accentuates the sharp dissonances which
Emerson's ideality ignored.

[Footnote 92: _Easter-Day_, xxx.]


VI.

3. JOY IN POWER.


Browning was thus announced, we have seen, even by his splendour of
colouring and his rich and clear-cut plasticity, as something more than