552. Man takes that title now: that is, of ‘First, last, and best of things”, if, etc. See sections 17 and 18 of ‘Saul’, and stanza 10 of ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’. And see the grand dying speech of Paracelsus, which concludes Browning’s poem.
554. “A law of nature means nothing to Mr. Browning if it does not mean the immanence of power, and will, and love. He can pass with ready sympathy into the mystical feeling of the East, where in the unclouded sky, in the torrent of noonday light, God is so near
‘He glows above With scarce an intervention, presses close And palpitatingly, His soul o’er ours.’
But the wisdom of a Western ‘savant’ who in his superior intellectuality replaces the will of God by the blind force of nature, seems to Mr. Browning to be science falsely so called, a new ignorance founded upon knowledge,
‘A lamp’s death when, replete with oil, it chokes.’
To this effect argues the prophet John in ‘A Death in the Desert’, anticipating with the deep prevision of a dying man the doubts and questionings of modern days. And in the third of those remarkable poems which form the epilogue of the ‘Dramatis Personae’, the whole world rises in the speaker’s imagination into one vast spiritual temple, in which voices of singers, and swell of trumpets, and cries of priests are heard going up to God no less truly than in the old Jewish worship, while the face of Christ, instinct with divine will and love, becomes apparent, as that of which all nature is a type or an adumbration.” --Prof. Edward Dowden in his Comparative Study of Browning and Tennyson (Studies in Literature, 1789-1877). --