Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/280

254 254 THE HOMELINESS OF BROWNING part of that wide apparatus of life which it is man's business to learn how to use. It was from this safe, normal centre that he drew his arch, the full rain- bow of earthly reassurances, and it was thus that he became, at his zenith, the supreme celebrant in our time of the ultimate solace of love. Higher than that he does not go ; it is the key- stone of his arch. The transcendentalism of which we used to hear so much is merely the vapour on which the prism was cast ; its very weakness, as we have seen, was woven up with the strength of his life — it was just because it was of the earth, watery, that it reflected the divine colours so well. There are still solemn persons, it is true, stout sons of their fathers, who will insist on going out, with little clattering pails, and returning to us proudly with indubitable rain-water — which they assure us is the very blood and essence of the bow. Dear, queer, estimable people ! " Does Browning urge this ? " they ask ; and " Did he mean us to regard the other ? " ; and go gathering maxims in his poems — gleaning fossils in a field of corn and poppies. How much they would have us miss ! One instance, a central one, to end with. " Entirely honest merchant " that he was, Browning shows in nothing the hearty simplicity of his nature so well as in his uneasy anxiety to convince himself that he is doing some- thing more than merely sing. Pippa itself, as is too rarely recognized, is just an attempt to prove the practical value of song, the material importance of the poet; so, of course, is Saul. He felt fidgety without a tangible purpose — and so would often self- deceptively assuage his sterling conscience by budding his roses on solid intellectual trunks. If he painted a landscape he must have a stout peg to hang it on — and then a wall to justify the nail — and then a house for the wall — and there, in sd winking, you