Passing onward from this mid-century phase of Browning's interest in what I have called the battle of the mind and the spirit, we find him in his later poems taking up the subject in its broader aspects, more as he treated it in "Paracelsus," yet with a marked difference in temper. God is no longer conceived of merely as a divine creator, joying in the wonder and beauty of his creations. The ideal of the artist has been modified by the observation of the thinker and the feeling induced by human rather than by artistic emotion. Life's experiences have shown to the more humanly conscious Browning that the problem of evil is not one to be so easily dismissed. The scientist may point out that evil is but lack of development, and the lover and artist may exult when he sees the wonderful processes of nature and mind carrying forward development until he can picture a time when the evil shall become null and void, but the human, feeling being sees the misery and the unloveliness of evil. It does not satisfy him to know that it is lack of development or the outcome of lack of development, nor yet that it will grow less as time goes on he ponders the problem, "why is evil permitted, how is it to be harmonized with the existence of a universe planned upon a scheme which he believes to be the outcome of a source all-powerful and all-loving!" About this problem and its corollary, the conception of the infinite, Browning's latter-day thought revolves as it did in his middle years about the basis of religious belief. It is one of the strange freaks of criticism that many admirers of Browning's earlier work have failed to see the importance of his later poems, especially "Ferishtah's Fancies," and "The Parleyings," not only as expressions of the poet's own spiritual growth, but as showing his mental grasp of the problems which the advance of nineteenth-century scientific thought brought to the fore in the last days of the century. The date at which various critics have declared that Browning ceased to write poetry might be considered an index of the time when that critic's powers became atrophied. No less a person than Edmund Gosse is of the opinion that since 1868 the poet's books were chiefly valuable as keeping alive popular interest in him, and as leading fresh generations of readers to what he had already published. Fortunately it has long been admitted that Homer sometimes nods, though not with such awful effect as was said to attend the nods of Jove. Hence, in spite of Mr. Gosse's undoubted eminence as a critic, we may dare to assume that in this particular instance he fell into the ancient and distinguished trick of nodding.