Yet this composition, which Mr. Browning must have undertaken in a moment of high indignation, with the motive of self-relief, is full of common sense. Mr. Sludge's vindication of his career turns upon the point that people like on the whole to be deceived, especially in matters relating to the invisible world. Sludge must be right in this; otherwise the theologians would not have had such a successful run. The facile and eager "circle" betrays the imaginative medium into reporting what it appears most to desire. The superstition of the people excites and feeds his own. He is only one against a crowd which deluges him with its expectation, and resents a scarcity of the supernatural. Mr. Sludge is not so much to blame: the people at length push the thing so far that he is obliged to cheat in self-defence. And when a man tasks his wits successfully, if it be only to mislead the witless, he has a sense of satisfaction in the effort akin to that of the rhetorician and the quack. But shrewdness and good sense cannot make a poem by assuming the measure of blank verse. And a few Yankee phrases are pasted into Mr. Sludge's talk, such as "stiffish cock-tail," "V-notes," "sniggering," allusions to "Greeley's newspaper," Beacon Street, etc.: there is no character in them at all. Mr. Sludge is a bad Yankee, as well as impudent pleader. The lines never sparkle, even with the poet's indignation, but they seem to be all the time blown into a forced vivacity and heat. Nemesis attends the poet who plunges his arm for a subject into this burrow of Spiritualism. Let us pass from this to note the noble lesson that the last poem, entitled "Epilogue," conveys. Three speakers tell in turn their feeling of the Divine Presence. The first intones the old Hebrew notion, loved by the childhood of all races and countries, that the Lord's Face fills His earthly temple at stated periods, culminating with the human glory of psalms and hallelujahs, to absorb and shine in the rejoicing of the worshippers, to sink back again into the invisible upon the dying strain. The second speaker describes the reaction, when the enthusiastic belief of early times is replaced by a dull sense that no Face shines, by a doubt if beyond the darkness and the distance there be yet a God who will answer to the old rapture, a sun to rise when man's heart rises, a love corresponding to his ecstasy:-- "Where may hide what came and loved our clay? How shall the sage detect in yon expanse The star which chose to stoop and stay for us? Unroll the records!"