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Although living the life of retirement which his wife's uncertain state of health required, Browning gradually obtained the acquaintance of several interesting persons, of whom Kirkup, who has just been mentioned, was one. "As to Italian society," wrote Mrs Browning, "one may as well take to longing for the evening star, for it seems quite inaccessible." But the name of Elizabeth Barrett, if not yet that of Robert Browning, was a sufficient introduction to cultivated Englishmen and Americans who had made Florence their home. Among the earliest of these acquaintances were the American sculptor Powers, Swedenborgian and spiritualist (a simple and genial man, "with eyes like a wild Indian's, so black and full of light"), and Hillard, the American lawyer, who, in his Six months in Italy, described Browning's conversation as "like the poetry of Chaucer," meaning perhaps that it was hearty, fresh, and vigorous, "or like his own poetry simplified and made transparent." "It seems impossible," Hillard goes on, "to think that he can ever grow old." And of Mrs Browning: "I have never seen a human frame which seemed so nearly a transparent veil for a celestial and immortal spirit. She is a soul of fire enclosed in a shell of pearl." A third American friend was one who could bring tidings of Emerson and Hawthorne—Margaret Fuller of "The Dial," now Countess d'Ossoli, "far better than her writings," says Mrs Browning, "… not only exalted but exaltée in her opinions, yet calm in manner." Her loss, with that of her husband, on their voyage to America deeply affected Mrs Browning. "Was she happy in anything?" asks her sorrowing friend. The first person seen on Italian soil when Browning and his wife disembarked at Leghorn was the brilliant and erratic Irish priest, "Father Prout" of Fraser's Magazine, who befriended them with good spirits and a potion of eggs and port wine when Browning was ill in Florence, and chided Mrs Browning as a "bambina" for her needless fears. Charles Lever "with the sunniest of faces and cordialest of manners"—animal spirits preponderating a little too much over an energetic intellect—called on them at the Baths of Lucca, but the acquaintance did not ripen into friendship. And little Miss Boyle, one of the family of the Earls of Cork, would come at night, at the hour of chestnuts and mulled wine, to sparkle as vivaciously as the pine-log that warmed her feet. These, with the Hoppners, known to Shelley and Byron, a French sculptress of royalist sympathies, Mlle. de Fauveau, much admired by Browning, and one of the grandsons of Goethe, who flits into and out of the scene, were a compensation for the repulsiveness of certain English folk at Florence who gathered together only for the frivolities, and worse than frivolities, of foreign wayfaring.

In March 1849 joy and sorrow met and mingled in the lives of Browning and his wife. On the ninth of that month a son was born at Casa Guidi, who six weeks later was described by his mother as "a lovely, fat, strong child, with double chin and rosy cheeks and a great wide chest." He was baptised, with the simple Lutheran rites, Robert Wiedemann Barrett—the "Wiedemann" in remembrance of the maiden name of Browning's mother. From the first, Browning and his wife, to adopt a phrase from one of her letters, caught up their parental pleasures with a sort of passion.⁴⁵ Mrs Browning's letters croon with happiness in the beauty, the strength, the intelligence, the kind-hearted disposition of her boy. And the boy's father, from the days when he would walk up and down the terrace of Casa Guidi with the infant in his arms to the last days of his life, felt to the full the gladness and the repose that came with this strong bondage of his heart. When little Wiedemann could frame imperfect speech upon his lips he transformed that name into "Penini," which abbreviated to "Pen" became serviceable for domesticities. It was a fantastic derivation of Nathaniel Hawthorne which connected Penini with the colossal statue in Florence bearing the name of "Apeninno." Flush for a time grew jealous, and not altogether without cause.

But the joy was pursued and overtaken by sorrow. A few days after the birth of his son came tidings of the death of Browning's mother. He had loved her with a rare degree of passion; the sudden reaction from the happiness of his wife's safety and his son's birth was terrible; it almost seemed a wrong to his grief to admit into his consciousness the new gladness of the time. In this conflict of emotions his spirits and to some extent his health gave way. He could not think of returning to his father's home without extreme pain—"It would break his heart," he said, "to see his mother's roses over the wall, and the place where she used to lay her scissors and gloves." He longed that his father and sister should quit the home of sorrow, and hasten to Florence; but this was not to be. As for England, it could not be thought of as much on his wife's account as his own. Her father held no communication with her; supplicating letters remained unnoticed; her brothers were temporarily estranged. Her sister Henrietta had left her former home; having "insulted" her father by asking his consent to her marriage with Captain Surtees Cook, she had taken the matter into her own hands; the deed was done, and the name of his second undutiful daughter—married to a person of moderate means and odiously "Tractarian views"—was never again to be mentioned in Mr Barrett's presence. England had become for Mrs Browning a place of painful memories, and a centre of present strife which she did not feel herself as yet able to encounter.

The love of wandering, however, when successive summers came, and Florence was ablaze with sunshine, grew irresistible, and drove Browning and his household to seek elsewhere for fresh interests or for coolness and repose. In 1848, beguiled by the guide-book, they visited Fano to find it quivering with heat, "the very air swooning in the sun." Their reward at Fano was that picture by Guercino of the guardian angel teaching a child to pray, the thought of which Browning has translated into song:

 
We were at Fano, and three times we went
To sit and see him in his chapel there,
And drink his beauty to our soul's content
—My angel with me too.
 

Ancona, where the poem was written, if its last line is historically true, followed Fano, among whose brown rocks, "elbowing out the purple tides," and brown houses—"an exfoliation of the rock"—they lived for a week on fish and cold water. The tour included Rimini and Ravenna, with a return to Florence by Forli and a passage through the Apennines. Next year—1849—when Pen was a few months old, the drop of gipsy blood in Browning's veins, to which his wife jestingly refers, tingled but faintly; it was Mrs Browning's part to compel him, for the baby's sake and hers, to seek his own good. They visited Spezzia and glanced at the house of Shelley at Lerici; passed through olive woods and vineyards, and rested in "a sort of eagle's nest" at the highest habitable point of the Baths of Lucca. Here the baby's great cheeks grew rosier; Browning gained in spirits; and his wife was able "to climb the hills and help him to lose himself in the forests." When they wandered at noon except for some bare-footed peasant or some monk with the rope around his waist, it was complete solitude; and on moonlit nights they sat by the waterfalls in an atmosphere that had the lightness of mountain air without its keenness. On one occasion they climbed by dry torrent courses five miles into the mountains, baby and all, on horseback and donkeyback—"such a congregation of mountains; looking alive in the stormy light we saw them by." It was certainly a blessed transformation of the prostrate invalid in the upper room at Wimpole Street. Setting aside his own happiness, Browning could feel with regard to her and his deep desire to serve her, that he had seen of the travail of his soul, and in this matter was satisfied.

The weeks at Siena of the year 1850 were not quite so prosperous. During that summer Mrs Browning had been seriously ill. When sufficiently recovered she was carried by her husband to a villa in the midst of vines and olives, a mile and a half or two miles outside Siena, which commanded a noble prospect of hills and plain. At first she could only remain seated in the easy-chair which he found for her in the city. For a day there was much alarm on behalf of the boy, now able to run about, who lay with heavy head and glassy eyes in a half-stupor; but presently he was astir again, and his "singing voice" was heard in the house and garden. Mrs Browning in the fresh yet warm September air regained her strength. Before returning to Florence, they spent a week in the city to see the churches and the pictures by Sodoma. Even little Wiedemann screamed for church-interiors and developed remarkable imitative pietisms of a theatrical kind. "It was as well," said Browning, "to have the eyeteeth and the Puseyistical crisis over together."

This comment, although no more than a passing word spoken in play, gives a correct indication of Browning's feeling, fully shared in by his wife, towards the religious movement in England which was altering the face of the established Church. "Puseyism" was for them a kind of child's play which unfortunately had religion for its play-ground; they viewed it with a superior smile, in which there was more of pity than of anger. Both of them, though one was a writer for the stage and the other could read Madame Bovary without flinching and approved the morals of La Dame aux Camélias, had their roots in English Puritanism.⁴⁶ And now the time had come when Browning was to embody some of his Puritan thoughts and feelings relating to religion in a highly original poem.

Chapter VII
Christmas Eve and Easter Day

Christmas Eve and Easter Day was published by Chapman & Hall in the year 1850. It was reported to the author that within the first fortnight two hundred copies had been sold, with which evidence of moderate popularity he was pleased; but the initial success was not maintained and subsequently the book became, like Sordello, a "remainder." As early as 1845, in the opening days of the correspondence with Miss Barrett, when she had called upon her friend to speak as poet in his own person and to speak out, he assured her that whereas hitherto he had only made men and women utter themselves on his behalf and had given the truth not as pure white light but broken into prismatic hues, now he would try to declare directly that which was in him. In place of his men and women he would have her to be a companion in his work, and yet, he adds, "I don't think I shall let you hear, after all, the savage things about Popes and imaginative religions that I must say." We can only conjecture as to whether the theme of the poem of 1850 was already in Browning's mind. His wife's influence certainly was not unlikely to incline him towards the choice of a subject which had some immediate relation to contemporary thought. She knew that poetry to be of permanent value must do more than reflect a passing fashion; that in a certain sense it must in its essence be out of time and space, expressing ideas and passions which are parts of our abiding humanity. Yet she recognised an advantage in pressing into what is permanent through the forms which it assumes in the world immediately around the artist. And even in 1845 the design of such a poem as her own Aurora Leigh was occupying her thoughts; she speaks of her intention of writing a sort of "novel-poem, running into the midst of our conventions, and rushing into drawing-rooms and the like, 'where angels fear to tread'; and so, meeting face to face and without mask the Humanity of the age, and speaking the truth as I conceive of it out plainly." Browning's poem did not rush into drawing-rooms, but it stepped boldly into churches and conventicles and the lecture-rooms of theological professors.

The spiritual life individual and the spiritual life corporate—these, to state it in a word, are the subjects dealt with in the two connected poems of his new volume; the spiritual life individual is considered in Easter Day; the spiritual life corporate in Christmas Eve. Browning, with the blood of all the Puritans in him, as his wife expressed it, could not undervalue that strain of piety which had descended from the exiles at Geneva and had run on through the struggles for religious liberty in the nonconformist religious societies of the seventeenth century and the Evangelical revival of times less remote. Looking around him he had seen in his own day the progress of two remarkable movements—one embodying, or professing to embody, the Catholic as opposed to the Puritan conception of religion, the other a free critical movement, tending to the disintegration of the traditional dogma of Christianity, yet seeking to preserve and maintain its ethical and even in part its religious influence. The facts can be put concisely if we say that one and the same epoch produced in England the sermons of Spurgeon, the Apologia pro vita sua of Newman, and the Literature and Dogma of Matthew Arnold. To discuss these three conceptions of religion adequately in verse would have been impossible even for the argumentative genius of Dryden, and would have converted a work of art into a theological treatise. But three representative scenes might be painted, and some truths of passionate feeling might be flung out by way of commentary. Such was the design of the poet of Christmas Eve.

To topple over from the sublime to the ridiculous is not difficult. But the presence of humour might save the sublimities from a fall, and Browning had hitherto in his art made but slight and occasional use of a considerable gift of humour which he possessed. It was humour not of the highest or finest or subtlest kind; it was very far from the humour of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, which felt so profoundly all the incongruities, majestic, pathetic, and laughable, of human nature. But it had a rough vigour of its own; it was united with a capacity for exact and shrewd observation; and if it should ever lead him to play the part of a satirist, the satire must needs be rather that of love than of malice. One who esteemed so highly the work of Balzac and of Flaubert might well be surmised to have something in his composition of what we now call the realist in art; and the work of the realist might serve to sustain and vindicate the idealist's ventures of imaginative faith. The picture of the lath-and-plaster entry of "Mount Zion" and of the pious sheep—duly indignant at the interloper in their midst—who one by one enter the fold, if not worthy of Cervantes or of Shakespeare, is hardly inferior to the descriptive passages of Dickens, and it is touched, in the manner of Dickens, with pity for these rags and tatters of humanity. The night, the black barricade of cloud, the sudden apparition of the moon, the vast double rainbow, and He whose sweepy garment eddies onward, become at once more supernatural and more unquestionably real because sublimity springs out of grotesquerie. Is the vision of the face of Christ an illusion?

 
The whole face turned upon me full,
And I spread myself beneath it,
As when the bleacher spreads, to seethe it
In the cleansing sun, his wool,—
Steeps in the flood of noontide whiteness
Some defiled, discoloured web—
So lay I saturate, with brightness.
 

Is this a phantom or a dream? Well, at least it is certain that the witness has seen with his mortal eyes the fat weary woman, and heard the mighty report of her umbrella, "wry and flapping, a wreck of whalebones." And the fat woman of Mount Zion Chapel, with Love Lane at the back of it, may help us to credit the awful vision of the Lord.

Thus the poem has the imaginative sensuousness which art demands; it is not an argument but a series of vivid experiences, though what is sensuous is here tasked in the service of what is spiritual, and a commentary is added. The central idea of the whole is that where love is, there is Christ; and the Christ of this poem is certainly no abstraction, no moral ideal, no transcendental conception of absolute charity, but very God and very man, the Christ of Nazareth, who dwelt among men, full of grace and truth. Literary criticism which would interpret Browning's meaning in any other sense may be ingenious, but it is not disinterested, and some side-wind blows it far from the mark.

Love with defective knowledge, he maintains, is of more spiritual worth than knowledge with defective love. Desiring to give salience to this idea, he deprives his little pious conventicle of every virtue except one—"love," and no other word is written on each forehead of the worshippers. Browning, the artist and student of art, was not insensible to the spiritual power of beauty; and beauty is conspicuously absent from the praise and prayer that went up from Mount Zion chapel; its forms of worship are burlesque and uncouth. Browning, the lover of knowledge, was not insensible to the value of intelligence in things of religion; and the congregation of Mount Zion sit on "divinely flustered" under

 
the pig-of-lead-like pressure
Of the preaching man's immense stupidity.
 

The pastor, whose words so sway his enraptured flock, mangles the Holy Scriptures with a fine irreverence, and pours forth his doctrine with an entirely self-satisfied indifference to reason and common sense. Nor has love accomplished its perfect work, for the interloper who stands at the entry is eyed with inquisitorial glances of pious exclusiveness—how has a Gallio such as he ventured to take his station among the elect? Matthew Arnold, had he visited Mount Zion, might have discoursed with a charmingly insolent urbanity on the genius for ugliness in English dissent, and the supreme need of bringing a current of new ideas to play upon the unintelligent use of its traditional formulae. And Matthew Arnold would have been right. These are the precise subjects of Browning's somewhat rough-and-ready satire. But Browning adds that in Mount Zion, love, at least in its rudiments, is present, and where love is, there is Christ.

Of English nonconformity in its humblest forms Browning can write, as it were, from within; he writes of Roman Catholic forms of worship as one who stands outside; his sympathy with the prostrate multitude in St. Peter's at Rome is of an impersonal kind, founded rather upon the recognition of an objective fact than springing from an instinctive feeling. For a moment he is carried away by the tide of their devout enthusiasms; but he recovers himself to find indeed that love is also here and therefore Christ is present, but the worshippers fallen under "Rome's gross yoke," are very infants in their need of these sacred buffooneries and posturings and petticoatings; infants

 
Peevish as ever to be suckled,
Lulled with the same old baby-prattle
With intermixture of the rattle.
 

And this, though the time has come when love would have them no longer infantile, but capable of standing and walking, "not to speak of trying to climb." Such a short and easy method of dealing with Roman Catholic dogma and ritual cannot be commended for its intelligence; it is quite possible to be on the same side as Browning without being as crude as he in misconception. He does not seriously consider the Catholic idea which regards things of sense as made luminous by the spirit of which they are the envoys and the ministers. It is enough for him to declare his own creed which treats any intermediary between the human soul and the Divine as an obstruction or a veil:

 
My heart does best to receive in meekness
That mode of worship, as most to his mind,
Where earthly aids being left behind,
His All in All appears serene
With the thinnest human veil between,
Letting the mystic lamps, the seven,
The many motions of his spirit,
Pass as they list to earth from heaven.
 

This was the creed of Milton and of Bunyan; and yet with both Milton and Bunyan the imagery of the senses is employed as the means not of concealing but revealing the things of the spirit.

From the lecture-room of Göttingen, with its destructive and reconstructive criticism, Browning is even farther removed than he is from the ritualisms of the Roman basilica. Yet no caricature can be more amiable than his drawing of the learned Professor, so gentle in his aspect, so formidable in his conclusions, who, gazing into the air with a pure abstracted look, proceeds in a grave sweet voice to exhibit and analyse the sources of the myth of Christ. In the Professor's lecture-room Browning finds intellect indeed but only the shadow of love. He argues that if the "myth" of Christ be dissolved, the authority of Christ as a teacher disappears; Christ is even inferior to other moralists by virtue of the fact that He made personal claims which cannot be sustained. And whatever may be Christ's merit as a teacher of the truth, the motive to action which His life and words supplied must cease to exist if it be shown that the divine sacrifice of God manifest in the flesh is no more than a figment of the devout imagination. At every point the criticism of Browning is as far apart as it is possible to conceive from the criticism set forth in the later writings of Matthew Arnold. The one writer regards the "myth" as no more than the grave-clothes of a risen Christ whose essential virtue lies in his sweet reasonableness and his morality touched with enthusiasm. The other believes that if the wonderful story of love be proved a fable, a profound alteration—and an alteration for the worse—has been made in the religious consciousness of Christendom. And undoubtedly the difference between the supernatural and the natural theories of Christianity is far greater than Arnold represented it to be. But Browning at this date very inadequately conceived the power of Christ as a revealer of the fatherhood of God. In that revelation, whether the Son of God was human or divine, lay a truth of surpassing power, and a motive of action capable of summoning forth the purest and highest energies of the soul. That such is the case has been abundantly evidenced by the facts of history. Browning finds only much learning and the ghost of dead love in the Göttingen lecture-room; and of course it was easy to adapt his Professor's lecture so as to arrive at this conclusion. But the process and the conclusion are alike unjust.

Having traversed the various forms of Christian faith and scepticism, the speaker in Christmas Eve declines into a mood of lazy benevolence and mild indifferentism towards each and all of these. Has not Christ been present alike at the holding-forth of the poor dissenting son of thunder, who tore God's word into shreds, at the tinklings and posturings and incense-fumes of Roman pietism, and even at the learned discourse which dissolved the myth of his own life and death? Why, then, over-strenuously take a side? Why not regard all phases of belief or no-belief with equal and serene regard? Such a mood of amiable indifferentism is abhorrent to Browning's feelings. The hem of Christ's robe passes wholly at this point from the hand of the seer of visions in his poem. One best way of worship there needs must be; ours may indeed not be the absolutely best, but it is our part, it is our probation to see that we strive earnestly after what is best; yes, and strive with might and main to confer upon our fellows the gains which we have found. It may be God's part—we trust it is—to bring all wanderers to the one fold at last. As for us, we must seek after Him and find Him in the mode required by our highest thought, our purest passion. Here Browning speaks from his central feeling. Only, we may ask, what if one's truest self lie somewhere hidden amid a thousand hesitating sympathies? And is not the world spacious enough to include a Montaigne as well as a Pascal or a Browning? Assuredly the world without its Montaigne would be a poorer and a less hospitable dwelling-place for the spirits of men.

Mrs Browning complained to her husband of what she terms the asceticism of Easter Day, the second part of his volume of 1850; his reply was that it stated "one side of the question." "Don't think," Mrs Browning says, "that he has taken to the cilix—indeed he has not—but it is his way to see things as passionately as other people feel them." Easter Day has nothing to say of religious life in Churches and societies, nothing of the communities of public worship. For the writer of this poem only three things exist—God, the individual soul, and the world regarded as the testing place and training place of the soul. Browning has here a rigour of moral or spiritual earnestness which may be called, by any one who so pleases, Puritan in its kind and its intensity; he feels the need, if we are to attain any approximation to the Christian ideal, of the lit lamp and the girt loin. Two difficulties in the Christian life in particular he chooses to consider—first, the difficulty of faith in the things of the spirit, and especially in what he regards as the essential parts of the Christian story; and secondly, the difficulty of obeying the injunction to renounce the world. That we cannot grow to our highest attainment by the old method enjoined by pagan philosophy—that of living according to nature, he regards as evident, for nature itself is warped and marred; it groans and travails, and from its discords how shall we frame a harmony? It was always his habit of mind, he tells us, from his childhood onwards, to face a danger and confront a doubt, and if there were anywhere a lurking fear, to draw this forth from its hiding-place and examine it in the light, even at the risk of some mortal ill. Therefore he will press for an answer to his present questionings; he will try conclusions to the uttermost.

As to the initial difficulty of faith, Browning with a touch of scorn, assures us that evidences of spiritual realities, evidences of Christianity—as they are styled—external and internal will be readily found by him who desires to find; convincing enough they are for him who wants to be convinced. But in truth faith is a noble venture of the spirit, an aspiring effort towards what is best, even though what is best may never be attained. The mole gropes blindly in unquestionably solid clay; better be like the grasshopper "that spends itself in leaps all day to reach the sun." A grasshopper's leap sunwards—that is what we signify by this word "faith."

But the difficulties of the Christian life only shift their place when faith by whatever means has been won. We are bidden to renounce the world: what does the injunction mean? in what way shall it be obeyed? "Ascetic" Mrs Browning named this poem; and ascetic it is if by that word we understand the counselling and exhorting to a noble exercise and discipline; but Browning even in his poem by no means wears the cilix, and no teaching can be more fatal than his to asceticism in the narrower sense of the word. To renounce the world, if interpreted aright, is to extinguish or suppress no faculty that has been given to man, but rather to put each faculty to its highest uses:

 
"Renounce the world!"—Ah, were it done
By merely cutting one by one
Your limbs off, with your wise head last,
How easy were it!—how soon past,
If once in the believing mood.
 

The harder and the higher renunciation is this—to choose the things of the spirit rather than the things of sense, and again in accepting, as means of our earthly discipline and development, the things of sense to press through these to the things of the spirit which lie behind and beyond and above them.

Such, and such alone, is the asceticism to which Browning summons his disciple; it is the asceticism of energy not that of atrophy; it does not starve the senses, but reinforces the spirit; it results not in a cloistered but a militant virtue. A certain self-denial it may demand, but the self-denial becomes the condition of a higher joy. And if life with its trials frays the flesh, what matters it when the light of the spirit shines through with only a fuller potency? In the choice between sense and spirit, or, to put it more generally, in the choice between what is higher and less high, lies the probation of a soul, and also its means of growth. And what is the meaning of this mortal life—this strange phenomenon otherwise so unintelligible—if it be not the moment in which a soul is proved, the period in which a soul is shaped and developed for other lives to come?

To forget that Browning is a preacher may suit a dainty kind of criticism which detaches the idea of beauty from the total of our humanity addressed by the greater artists. But the solemn thoughts that are taken up by beauty in such work, for example, as that of Michael Angelo, are an essential element or an essential condition of its peculiar character as a thing of beauty. And armour, we know, may be as lovely to the mere senses as a flower. Browning's doctrine may sometimes protrude gauntly through his poetry; but at his best—as in Rabbi ben Ezra or Abt Vogler—the thought of the poem is needful in the dance of lyrical enthusiasm, as the male partner who takes hands with beauty, and to separate them would bring the dance to a sudden close. Both are present in Easter Day, and we must watch the movement of the two. In a passage already quoted from Christmas Eve the face of Christ is nobly imagined as the sun which bleaches a discoloured web. Here the poet's imagination is as intense in its presentation of Christ the doomsman:

 
He stood there. Like the smoke
Pillared o'er Sodom, when day broke—
I saw Him. One magnific pall
Mantled in massive fold and fall
His head, and coiled in snaky swathes
About His feet; night's black, that bathes
All else, broke, grizzled with despair,
Against the soul of blackness there.
A gesture told the mood within—
That wrapped right hand which based the chin,—
That intense meditation fixed
On His procedure,—pity mixed
With the fulfilment of decree.
Motionless thus, He spoke to me,
Who fell before His feet, a mass,
No man now.
 

The picture of the final conflagration of the Judgment Day is perhaps over-laboured, a descriptive tour de force, horror piled upon horror with accumulative power,—a picture somewhat too much in the manner of Martin; and the verse does not lend itself to the sustained sublimity of terror. The glow of Milton's hell is intenser, and Milton's majestic instrumentation alone could render the voices of its flames. The real awfulness of Browning's Judgment Day dwells wholly in the inner experiences of a solitary soul. The speaker finds of a sudden that the doom is upon him, and that in the probation of life his choice was earth, not heaven. The sentence pronounced upon him is in accordance with the election of his own will—let earth, with all its beauty of nature, all its gifts of human art, all its successes of the intellect, as he had conceived and chosen them, be his. To his despair, he finds that what he had prized in life, and what is now granted to him cannot bring him happiness or even content. The plenitude of beauty, of which all partial beauty was but a pledge, is forever lost to him. The glory of art, which lay beyond its poor actual attainments, is lost. The joy of knowledge, with all those