pour servir. But this competency is so rare a gift, that for readers of ordinary calibre these personal illustrations are necessary, and hence Mr. Browning's commendation of the present series to an incompetent and profanum vulgus.
In his admiration of Shelley we cordially share, and readily do we echo his conviction that the time is past for confounding with genuine infidelity, and an atheism of the heart, those passionate, impatient struggles of a boy towards distant truth and love, made in the dark, which were ended by one sweep of the natural seas before the full moral sunrise could shine out on him. Whether, however, Mr. Browning has greatly aided the growing tendency to claim Shelley as
The best good Christian he,
Although he knew it not,—
is doubtful. Shelley's noble heart, his high spirit of intellectual purity, his fervid aspirations after truth, we have ever reverenced. But his antagonism to the creed of Christendom is prominent among the curiosities of literature. It was once remarked to Mr. Leigh Hunt by a "literary divine" and, we believe, "popular preacher," from the North—a gentleman who, alike in pulpit and press, is nothing if not exaggerated and oracular—that the simple distinction between Shelley and Christianity was this: Shelley said "Love is God," while Christianity says "God is Love." Possibly this may seem a distinction without a difference. The definition may have its modicum of truth if by Christianity we understand a mere spiritual tendency, abstracted from all concrete particulars, denuded of circumstantials, and considered irrespective of any historical basis. But if by Christianity be meant a system involving doctrine and cultus, principles and practice, then the alleged difference is, to our thinking, only another version of that which exists between a horse-chestnut and a chestnut-horse. That Shelley, had he lived, might have renounced his bitter enmity to the religion of the Cross, we have every disposition to hope, and some degree of reason to believe. But side we cannot with those who consider the conversion un fait accompli, or something equivalent. Mr. Browning is not one of these too paradoxical people; but he is sanguine as to the ultimate results of Shelley's truth-seeking, had life been spared to the seeker:
I call him a man of religious mind, because every audacious negative cast up by him against the Divine, was interpenetrated with a mood of reverence and adoration,—and because I find him everywhere taking for granted some of the capital dogmas of Christianity, while most vehemently denying their historical basement.
With equal tenderness and justice Mr. Browning dwells on the physical peculiarities of this poet, whose destiny it was
To thirst and find no fill—to wail and wander
With short unsteady steps—
and shows how unfavourable they were to the "steady symmetries of conventional life"—the body tortured by incurable disease, "refusing to give repose to the bewildered soul, tossing in its hot fever of the fancy; and the laudanum bottle making but a perilous and pitiful truce between these two." By his own testimony, Shelley was liable to remarkable delusions and hallucinations, and appears to have been a somnambulist to the very close of his life.
