Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/277

THE HOMELINESS OF BROWNING 251 painfully. But each, before the end, gasped out a certain piece of advice. "Regard me," says the dying Paracelsus — Regard me and the poet dead long ago, Who loved too rashly — and shape forth a third And better- tempered spirit, warned by both. The life of the intellect, urged both, must be balanced by some exterior devotion ; egoism unlinked with love means horrid dooms. So said these Browning 7nanqu4s. We know how he took the warning. The second half of Paracelsus, as inspection makes clear, is just an empty shell, a dummy, stuck on for the sake of symmetry. The true conclusion was not effected until that brave September morning of 1846 when the poet swept down upon 50, Wimpole Street — snatched Miss Barrett out of her darkened room, heavy with opiates — and away to Florence and the sun-sluiced Apennines : I have gained her I Her soul's mine, and now, grown perfect, I shall pass my life's remainder. Perfection! Was it really that? We can only guess at the alternatives: who shall say? Yet one or two points, apt to our main argument, cannot be concealed. It is plain, to begin with, that it was this practical attitude towards poetry, continued in his later work, that both gained him his intimidating title of philosopher and robbed him of any real right to it. He was no true speculator, in spite of his followers : all he sought was a safe investment for his time. Long before Harvard had invented the word he was only a pragma tist. His Rabbi Ben Ezras and Blougrams and Karshish are all agents