accepted by the reason, as he wrote a few years later, it solved “all problems in the earth and out of it.”  To that solution Shelley seemed to Browning to be on the way, and his incomplete grasp of it appealed to him more powerfully than did the elaborate dogmatisms professedly based upon it.  Shelley had mistaken “Churchdom” for Christianity; but he was on the way, Browning was convinced, to become a Christian himself.  “I shall say what I think,—­had Shelley lived he would have finally ranged himself with the Christians.”

This emphatic declaration is of great importance for Browning’s intellectual history.  He may have overlooked the immense barriers which must have always divided Shelley from the Christian world of his time; he may have overlooked also that the Christian thought of our time has in some important points “ranged itself with” Shelley; so that the Christianity which he might finally have adopted would have been sufficiently unlike that which he assailed.  But it is clear that for Browning himself the essence of Christianity lay at this time in something not very remote from what he revered as the essence of Shelleyism—­a corollary, as it were, ultimately implicit in his thought.

It was thus a deeper poetical rather than a religious or doctrinal interest which drew Browning in these Italian years, again and again to seek his revealing experiences of souls amid the eddies and convulsions, the exultations and the agonies, brought into the world by the amazing “revelation of God in Christ.”  It is true that we nowhere approach this focus of interest, that we have no glimpse, through Browning’s art, how that “revelation” shaped itself in the first disciples, far less of Christ himself.  But that was at no time Browning’s way of bringing to expression what he deeply cared for.  He would not trumpet forth truth in his own person, or blazon it through the lips of the highest recognised authority; he let it struggle up through the baffling density, or glimmer through the conflicting persuasions of alien minds, and break out in cries of angry wonder or involuntary recognition.  And nowhere is this method carried further than in the Christian poems of the Italian time.  The supreme musicians and painters he avoids, but Fra Lippo Lippi and Master Hugues belong at least to the crafts whose secrets they expound; while the Christian idea is set in a borrowed light caught from the souls of men outside the Christian world—­an Arab physician, a Greek poet, a Jewish shepherd or rabbi, or from Christians yet farther from the centre than these, like Blougram and the Abbe Deodaet.  In method as in conception these pieces are among the most Browningesque things that Browning ever wrote.  It is clear, however, that while his way of handling these topics is absolutely his own, his peculiar concern with them is new.  The Karshish, the Clean, and the Blougram have no prototype or parallel among the poems of Browning’s