ception into form
adorns it. It creates the plain, the encircling mountains, one cloudy
peak higher than the rest; as we mount we look on the plain below; we
reach the city on the hill, pass it, and climb the hill-top; there are
all the high-flying birds, the meteors, the lightnings, the thickest
dew. And we lay our dead on the peak, above the plain. This is the
scenery, the imaginative ornament, and all through it we are made to
hear the chant of the students; and so lifting is the melody of the
verse we seem to taste the air, fresher and fresher as we climb. Then,
finally, into the midst of this flows for us the eager intensity of the
scholar. Dead as he is, we feel him to be alive; never resting, pushing
on incessantly, beating failure beneath his feet, making it the step for
further search for the infinite, resolute to live in the dull limits of
the present work, but never content save in waiting for that eternity
which will fulfil the failure of earth; which, missing earth's success,
throws itself on God, dying to gain the highest. This is the passion of
the poem, and Browning is in it like a fire. It was his own, his very
life. He pours it into the students who rejoice in the death of their
master, and he gives it to us as we read the poem. And then, because
conception, imagination, and intensity of thought and emotion all here
work together, as in _Abt Vogler_, the melody of the poem is lovely,
save in one verse which ought to be out of the poem. As to the
conclusion, it is priceless. Such a conclusion can only emerge when all
that precedes it finely contains it, and I have often thought that it
pictures Browning himself. I wish he had been buried on a mountain top,
all Italy below him.

Well, here's the platform, here's the proper place:
Hail to your purlieus,
All ye high-flyers of the feathered race,
Swallows and curlews!
Here's the top-peak; the multitude below
Live, for they can, there:
This man decided not to Live but Know--
Bury this man there?

Here--here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,
Lightenings are loosened.
Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm,
Peace let the dew send!
Lofty designs must close in like effects:
Loftily lying,
Leave him--still loftier than the world suspects,
Living and dying.

This is the artist at work, and I doubt whether all the laborious prose
written, in history and cr