To ordinary eyes he spends his days grovelling among the dust and dregs of erudition; but it is the grovelling of a builder at work upon a fabric so colossally planned that life is fitly spent in laying the foundations. He was made in the large mould of the gods,--born with "thy face and throat, Lyric Apollo,"--and the disease which crippled and silenced him in middle life could only alter the tasks on which he wreaked his mind. And now that he is dead, he passes, as by right, to the fellowship of the universe--of the sublime things of nature. "Here--here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form, Lightnings are loosened, Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm, Peace let the dew send! Lofty designs must close in like effects: Loftily lying, Leave him--still loftier than the world suspects, Living and dying." VI. _The Grammarian's Funeral_ achieves, in the terms and with the resources of Browning's art, the problem of which he saw the consummate master in Shelley,--that of throwing "films" for the connexion of Power and Love in the abstract with Beauty and Good in the concrete, and finding a link between the lowliest service or worship and the spirit of God. Such a conception of a poet's crowning glory implied a peculiarly close relation in Browning's view between poetry and religion, and in particular with the religion which, above all others, glorified the lowly. Here lay, in short, the supreme worth for him of the Christian idea. "The revelation of God in Christ" was for him the consummate example of that union of divine love with the world--"through all the web of Being blindly wove"--which Shelley had contemplated in the radiant glow of his poetry; accepted by the reason, as he wrote a few years later, it solved "all problems in the earth and out of it." To that solution Shelley seemed to Browning to be on the way, and his incomplete grasp of it appealed to him more powerfully than did the elaborate dogmatisms professedly based upon it. Shelley had mistaken "Churchdom" for Christianity; but he was on the way, Browning was convinced, to become a Christian himself. "I shall say what I think,--had Shelley lived he would have finally ranged himself with the Christians." This emphatic declaration is of great importance for Browning's intellectual history. He may have overlooked the immense barriers which must have always divided Shelley from the Christian world of his time; he may have overlooked also that the Christian thought of our time has in some important points "ranged itself with" Shelley; so that the Christianity which he might finally have adopted would have been sufficiently unlike that which he assailed. But it is clear that for Browning himself the essence of Christianity lay at this time in something not very remote from what he revered as the essence of Shelleyism--a corollary, as it were, ultimately implicit in his thought.