^{Note 1 in page 590} Cf. John Theodore Merz, A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh and London, 1914), IV, 360-363. In a note on page 363, Merz stresses the importance of the contribution of the great English poets of the nineteenth century to religious thought, as follows: “. . . . Imaginative writers, such notably as Tennyson and Robert Browning, who have, together with Wordsworth, perhaps more than any other writers, not only supplied thoughtful minds in this country with as much philosophy of religion as they required or could assimilate, but exhibit more than any others those specific characteristics of British thought which are so difficult for the foreigner to get hold of.”

^{Note 2 in page 591} A Writer's Recollections (London, 1918), II, 59-60.

^{Note 3 in page 591} From a letter dated May 11, 1876. This was printed in The Nonconformist, 1890, and in Letters from Robert Browning to Various Correspondents, Edited by Thos. J. Wise, 1895, I, 35-38. See also Mrs. Sutherland Orr's statement with regard to Browning: “He has repeatedly written or declared in the words of Charles Lamb: ‘If Christ entered the room I should fall on my knees’; and again, in those of Napoleon: ‘I am an understander of men, and He was no man.’ He has even added: ‘If he had been, he would have been an imposter’.” Life and Letters of Robert Browning (London, 1908), p. 303.

^{Note 4 in page 592} Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold (5th ed., London, 1845), I, 404.

^{Note 5 in page 592} From a letter of 1841 in Letters Literary, &c., p. 175.

^{Note 6 in page 592} John William Burgon, Inspiration and Interpretation, p. 89. The passage is cited as quoted in Colenso's The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua Critically Examined, p. 46.

^{Note 7 in page 593} Cited as quoted in R. M. Wenley's “Some Lights on the British Idealistic Movement in the Nineteenth Century,” Amer. Jour. of Theol., July 1901.

^{Note 8 in page 593} Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, op. cit., II, 175.

^{Note 9 in page 593} Frederick Maurice, The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice (London, 1884), II, 423.

^{Note 10 in page 594} See Matthew Arnold's strictures on Colenso in two articles in Macmillan's Magazine (Jan. and Feb. 1863), and in his Essay on the Function of Criticism (1865).

^{Note 11 in page 594} Otto Pfleiderer, The Development of Theology in Germany since Kant, and its Progress in Great Britain since 1825 (tr. by J. F. Smith), London, 1890, p. 387.

^{Note 12 in page 594} Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen, CXLVII, 203.

^{Note 13 in page 595} See The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett (N. Y. and Lond., 1889), I, 145, 147: II, 427, 434. Cf. “Mrs. Browning's Religious Opinions as Expressed in Three Letters” cited in Literary Anecdotes of the Nineteenth Century, II, 123-142.

^{Note 14 in page 596} Christmas-Eve, XXII, 66-73. Browning's own religious observance was in keeping with this declaration. In 1885, he wrote to W. G. Kingsland: “I frequently attended the service at Mr. Jones' Chapel about twenty years ago.” The place of worship referred to is Bedford Chapel, London. In Normandy, the poet went to a French reformed service with Milsand. In Venice he often attended a chapel of the Waldenseans. His son was baptised in the church of the French Lutherans at Florence.

^{Note 15 in page 597} Cited from The Quarterly Review, CLXX (1890), 492-493.

^{Note 16 in page 599} Thomas Carlyle, The Life of John Sterling (London, 1851), p. 271.

^{Note 17 in page 599} Ibid., p. 243.

^{Note 18 in page 599} Ideal of a Christian Church, 184-3, p. 266.

^{Note 19 in page 599} Mrs. Sutherland Orr, Life and Letters of Robert Browning (rev. ed.; London, 1908), p. 100. See also the statement in Mrs. Orr's A Handbook to Browning's Works, that Browning “has no bond of union with the German philosophers but the natural tendencies of his own mind,” and “resembles Hegel, Fichte, or Schelling . . . . by the purely creative impulse which has met their thoughts.”

^{Note 20 in page 600} Sir Frederic G. Kenyon, Robert Browning and Alfred Domett (Lond. 1906), p. 52.

^{Note 21 in page 600} Ibid., p. 57.

^{Note 22 in page 601} Cited from the 6th ed. of George Eliot's translation of Strauss's Das Leben Jesu (London, 1913), p. xxx.

^{Note 23 in page 602} Ibid., XVII, 30-39. Fräulein Kathe Goritz draws attention to an interesting parallel between these lines and the following passage from Coleridge's Aids to Reflection:

“Did Christ come from Heaven, did the Son of God leave the glory which he had with his Father before the world began, only to shew us a way to life, to teach truths, to tell us of a resurrection? Or saith he not, I am the way—I am the truth—I am the resurrection and the life?”

In view of the seminal influence of Aids to Reflection on the religious thought of minds as various as those of John Sterling, Frederick Maurice, Cardinal Newman and John Stuart Mill, it is possible that Browning may have been directly indebted to Coleridge's work. On the other hand, Mrs. Orr has stated that he “was emphatic in his assertion that he knew neither the German philosophers nor their reflection in Coleridge.” In any event, since the argument for Christ's divinity based on his life as the essence of his revelation is as frequently used by Tractarian and Evangelical writers as by Coleridge and Maurice, it does little to support Fräulein Goritz's contention, “Aus dem Geiste der Broad Church Movement ist Browning's ‘Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day’ geboren.” Perhaps the most elaborate example in English theology of a vein of thought similar to that in which Browning contrasts “mere morality” with “the God in Christ” is to be found in the Bampton Lectures of the High Churchman Canon Liddon, The Divinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and in his Some Elements of Religion.

^{Note 24 in page 602} Cf. Bishop Blougram's Apology, II, 578-595.

^{Note 25 in page 604} Browning Society Papers, Vol. II, Pt. III. Cited from the “Abstract” of the Forty-eighth Meeting.

^{Note 26 in page 604} References in the letters of Browning make it evident that a number of the poems printed in Dramatis Persona were composed in the later part of his Italian period before the death of his wife in 1861. On the other hand, Edmund Gosse is of the opinion that the greater part of Dramatis Personæ was written at the village of Ste. Marie, near Pornic, Brittany, where the poet spent the summers of 1862, 1863. Passages in Browning's letters to Isa Blagden allude to the composition of various pieces at Ste. Marie which were to be included in “the new poems” (i.e., Dramatis Personæ). Of the few poems in the first edition of Dramatis Persona whose dates of writing can be approximately determined by internal evidence, Prospice, James Lee's Wife, Gold Hair, Apparent Failure, and the Epilogue, were written after Mrs. Browning's death, and several of these as late as 1863.

^{Note 27 in page 605} Leiters of Robert Browning to Miss Isa Blagden, Arranged for publication by A. Joseph Armstrong, Waco, Texas, 1923, pp. 100-101.

^{Note 28 in page 606} As Chapman and Hall's advertisement of the first edition of Dramatis Persona appeared on May 28, 1864, A Death in the Desert was published six months after Browning's reading of Renan's La Vie de Jésus.

The contemporary notices of Dramatis Personæ in English literary journals generally assume that the poet had Renan's book in mind when composing A Death in ike Desert. For example, the Athenæum review of June 4, 1864, discussing the religious import of the poem, states: “It embodies the death of St, John in the desert and has the piquancy of making the beloved apostle reply with last words, in far off ghostly tones, which come, weirdly impressive, from that cave in the wilderness, to the Frenchman's ‘Life of Jesus.’ It is done simply and naturally; but could any sensation-novelist contrive anything so striking?” In like fashion, the London Quarterly Review of July 1865 comments as follows: “After M. Renan's ‘Life of Jesus,’ and the prelections of the Strasbourg school of theological thought, it should be welcome as it is worthy.” But, in David Gray, and other Essays, 1868, Robert Buchanan regards A Death in the Desert as being aimed at Strauss: “The second extract is from ‘A Death in the Desert,’ in which John the Evangelist is supposed to detail his opinions of his contemporaries, and, in a spirit impossibly prophetic, to review the arguments in the ‘Leben Jesu,’ against miracles.”

^{Note 29 in page 610} The Contemporary Review, Dec. 1891, p. 879.

^{Note 30 in page 610} The lack of consistency that characterizes the poet's thought in this respect has been ably discussed by A. C. Pigou in his valuable and discriminating Burney Essay for 1900, Robert Browning as a Religious Teacher.

^{Note 31 in page 611} Ibid., ll. 1362-1367. It is of interest to note that this is the identical argument used by Browning in the course of his conversation with Mrs. Orr in 1869. See pp. 27-28 of this article.

^{Note 32 in page 611} Ferishtah's Fancies—A Pillar at Sebzevar, vv. 134-135.

^{Note 33 in page 612} Ferishtah's Fancies—The Sun, vv. 139-143.

^{Note 34 in page 614} The Ring and the Book—The Pope, ll. 1383 ff.

^{Note 35 in page 616} The Ring and the Book—The Pope, ll. 1637-1652.

^{Note 36 in page 616} Saul, ll. 307-312. It is a strange travesty of Browning's thought in Saul to infer, as Gilbert Chesterton has done, that he regarded the Incarnation as proceeding from an envious desire of the Almighty to surpass his creature in sorrow and self-denial and read into the Crucifixion the “tremendous story of a Divine jealousy.” Were it not for the weight given to such a statement by the imprimatur of Mr. Chesterton, it would hardly seem needful to point out that the poet has no such monstrous paradox in mind. Rather, he is simply voicing a fundamental Christian idea connected with the Incarnation, that, since love at its highest contains an element of suffering and self-sacrifice, God's love must exceed man's in the manifestation of these qualities. Equally surprising is Mr. Chesterton's assertion that one of Browning's two great theories of the universe is what may be called “the hope that lies in the imperfection of God.” This is to caricature the poet's view and invert its true perspective. So far from basing his argument for the necessity of the Incarnation on “the hope that lies in the imperfection of God,” Browning bases it on the hope, or rather the assurance, that lies in the perfection of God and the infinite resources of his love. The conception of God which Chesterton represents Browning as holding is that which the poet himself ascribed to Caliban. Cf. G. K. Chesterton, Robert Browning (New York, 1903), p. 178.

^{Note 37 in page 617} Parleyings, etc.—With Bernard De Mandeville, XI, 8-10. The Pope in The Ring and the Book, voices the complement of this faith, from the human side, when he avows that man's perception of God must be conditioned by the finiteness of his faculties.

“O Thou,—as represented here to me

In such conception as my soul allows—

Under Thy measureless, my atom width!—

Man's mind, what is it but a convex glass

Wherein are gathered all the scattered points

Picked out of the immensity of sky,

To reunite there, be our heaven for earth,

Our known unknown, our God revealed to man?

Existent somewhere, somehow, as a whole;

Here, as a whole proportioned to our sense,—

There, (which is nowhere, speech must babble thus!)

In the absolute immensity, the whole

Appreciable solely by Thyself,—

Here, by the little mind of man, reduced

To littleness that suits his faculty

In the degree appreciable too

Between Thee and ourselves“ (The Pope, vv. 1308-24).

^{Note 38 in page 618} Ibid., X, 43-47.

^{Note 39 in page 619} The Ring and the Book—The Pope, ll. 1858-1862 and 1867-1868.

^{Note 40 in page 619} The Ring and the Booh—The Book and the Ring, ll. 775-778. Innocent XII became Pope in 1691; Voltaire was bom in 1694.

^{Note 41 in page 620} Mod. L. Notes, XLI (1926), 213-219.

^{Note 42 in page 621} Cited from Mrs. Orr's article, “The Religious Opinions of Robert Browning,” The Contemporary Review, Dec. 1891, p. 880.