“First comes plain bread, crisp, brown, a toasted square; Then, a strong sage-leaf; (So we find books with flowers dried here and there Lest leaf engage leaf.) First, food—then, piquancy—and last of all Follows the thirdling; Through wholesome hard, sharp soft, your tooth must bite Ere reach the birdling. Now, were there only crust to crunch, you’d wince: Unpalatable! Sage-leaf is bitter-pungent—so’s a quince; Eat each who’s able! But through all three bite boldly—lo, the gust! Flavour—no fixture— Flies permeating flesh and leaf and crust In fine admixture. So with your meal, my poem; masticate Sense, sight and song there! Digest these, and I praise your peptics’ state, Nothing found wrong there.” This extract also furnishes an example of the strange rhymes in which the poet sometimes indulges, with what appears too little refinement of taste. The themes of Browning’s poetry are the very greatest that can engage the thought of man. He ranges over a vast variety of topic; but, wherever his thought may lead him, he never loses sight of that which is to him the centre of all, the human soul, with its infinite wants and capabilities. In the preface to “Sordello” he says: “The historical decoration was purposely of no more importance than a background requires; and my stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth study. I, at least, always thought so.” To this principle he has kept true through all his work; and hence it is that, whether the particular subject be love, or home, or country; poetry, painting, or music; life, death, or immortality; it is dealt with in its relation to “the development of a soul.” Hence it is that his poetry is so thoroughly and profoundly spiritual, and so exceedingly valuable as a counteractive to the materialism of the age, which ever tends to merge the soul in the body, and swallow up the real in mere phenomena. As might be expected of one who deals so profoundly with all that he touches, the great reality of the universe to him is God. Agnosticism has little mercy at his hands; if a man knows anything at all, he knows God. And the God whom he knows is not a God apart, looking down from some infinite or indefinite height upon the world, but one in whom all live and move and have their being. Out of this springs, of course, the hope of immortality, and also that bright and cheerful view of life so completely opposed to the dark pessimism to which much of the unbelieving speculation of the present day so painfully tends. The dark things of human life and destiny are by no means ignored; rather are they dwelt on with a painful and sometimes frightful realism; but even amid deepest darkness the light above is never quite extinguished, and some little “Pippa passes” singing: