CHAPTER IX.
THE POET.
Then, who helps more, pray, to repair our loss-- Another Boehme with a tougher book And subtler meanings of what roses say,-- Or some stout Mage, like him of Halberstadt, John, who made things Boehme wrote thoughts about?
He with a "look you!" vents a brace of rhymes, And in there breaks the sudden rose herself, * * * * * Buries us with a glory, young once more, Pouring heaven into this shut house of life.
-- _Transcendentalism_.
I.
"I have, you are to know," Browning once wrote to Miss Haworth, "such a love for flowers and leaves ...

that I every now and then in an impatience at being unable to possess them thoroughly, to see them quite, satiate myself with their scent,--bite them to bits." "All poetry," he wrote some twenty years later to Ruskin, "is the problem of putting the infinite into the finite." Utterances like these, not conveyed through the lips of some "dramatic" creation, but written seriously in his own person to intimate friends, give us a clue more valuable it may be than some other utterances which are oftener quoted and better known, to the germinal impulses of Browning's poetic work.
"Finite" and "infinite" were words continually on his lips, and it is clear that both sides of the antithesis represented instincts rooted in his mental nature, drawing nourishment from distinct but equally fundamental springs of feeling and thought.

Each had its stronghold in a particular psychical region.

The province and feeding-ground of his passion for "infinity" was that eager and restless self-consciousness which he so vividly described in _Pauline_, seeking to "be all, have, see, know, taste, feel all," to become all natures, like Sordello, yet retain the law of his own being.

"I pluck the rose and love it more than tongue can speak," says the lover in _Two in the Campagna_.