Enough to furnish Solomon Such hangings for his cedar-house, That, when gold-robed he took the throne In that abyss of blue, the Spouse Might swear his presence shone X. Most like the centre-spike of gold Which burns deep in the blue-bell’s womb What time, with ardors manifold, The bee goes singing to her groom, Drunken and overbold. XI. Mere conchs! not fit for warp or woof! Till cunning come to pound and squeeze And clarify,--refine to proof *2* The liquor filtered by degrees, While the world stands aloof. XII. And there’s the extract, flasked and fine, And priced and salable at last! And Hobbs, Nobbs, Stokes, and Nokes combine To paint the future from the past, Put blue into their line. *3* XIII. Hobbs hints blue,--straight he turtle eats: Nobbs prints blue,--claret crowns his cup: Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats,-- Both gorge. Who finished the murex up? What porridge had John Keats? -- *1* named: Announced. *2* Original reading:-- “Till art comes,--comes to pound and squeeze And clarify,--refines to proof.” *3* “Line” is perhaps meant to be used equivocally,-- their line of business or line of their verse. -- The spiritual ebb and flow exhibited in English poetry (the highest tide being reached in Tennyson and Browning) which I have endeavored cursorily to present, bear testimony to the fact that human nature WILL assert its wholeness in the civilized man. And there must come a time, in the progress of civilization, when this ebb and flow will be less marked than it has been heretofore, by reason of a better balancing, which will be brought about, of the intellectual and the spiritual. Each will have its due activity. The man of intellectual pursuits will not have a starved spiritual nature; and the man of predominant spiritual functions will not have an intellect weakened into a submissiveness to formulated, stereotyped, and, consequently, lifeless dogmas. Robert Browning is in himself the completest fulfilment of this equipoise of the intellectual and the spiritual, possessing each in an exalted degree; and his poetry is an emphasized expression of his own personality, and a prophecy of the ultimate results of Christian civilization. II. The Idea of Personality and of Art as an intermediate agency of Personality, as embodied in Browning’s Poetry. 1. General Remarks. “Subsists no law of Life outside of Life. * * * * * The Christ himself had been no Lawgiver, Unless he had given the LIFE, too, with the law.”