But Browning became steadily more reluctant to admit that these fortunate moments ever occurred, that the Proteus was ever caught.

Things would be known to the soul as they were known to God only when it was emancipated by death.

Infinity receded into an ever more inaccessible remoteness from the finite.

For the speaker in _Christmas-Eve_ man's mind was the image of God's, reflecting trace for trace his absolute knowledge; for Francis Furini the bare fact of his own existence is all he knows, a narrow rock-spit of knowledge enisled in a trackless ocean of ignorance.

Thus for Browning, in differing moods and contexts, the mind of man becomes now a transparent pane, opening directly upon the truth as God sees it, now a coloured lens, presenting truth in blurred refraction, now an opaque mirror idly bodying forth his futile and illusive dreams.
[Footnote 137: _Paracelsus_.] [Footnote 138: _Fifine_, cxxiv.] These conflicting views were rooted in different elements of Browning's many-sided nature.