though, co-equally, in the necessity of "making man sole sponsor of
himself." Ever and again, of course, he was betrayed by the bewildering
and defiant puzzle of life: seeing in the face of the child the seed of
sorrow, "in the green tree an ambushed flame, in Phosphor a vaunt-guard
of Night." Yet never of him could be written that thrilling saying which
Sainte-Beuve uttered of Pascal, "That lost traveller who yearns for
home, who, strayed without a guide in a dark forest, takes many times
the wrong road, goes, returns upon his steps, is discouraged, sits down
at a crossing of the roads, utters cries to which no one responds,
resumes his march with frenzy and pain, throws himself upon the ground
and wants to die, and reaches home at last only after all sorts of
anxieties and after sweating blood." No darkness, no tempest, no gloom,
long confused his vision of 'the ideal dawn.' As the carrier-dove is
often baffled, yet ere long surely finds her way through smoke and fog
and din to her far country home, so he too, however distraught, soon or
late soared to untroubled ether. He had that profound inquietude, which
the great French critic says 'attests a moral nature of a high rank, and
a mental nature stamped with the seal of the archangel.' But, unlike
Pascal--who in Sainte-Beuve's words exposes in the human mind itself
two abysses, "on one side an elevation toward God, toward the morally
beautiful, a return movement toward an illustrious origin, and on the
other side an abasement in the direction of evil"--Browning sees,
believes in, holds to nothing short of the return movement, for one and
all, toward an illustrious origin.

The crowning happiness of a happy life was his death in the city he
loved so well, in the arms of his dear ones, in the light of a
world-wide fame. The silence to which the most eloquent of us must all
one day lapse came upon him like the sudden seductive twilight of the
Tropics, and just when he had bequeathed to us one of his finest
utterances.

It seems but a day or two ago that the present writer heard from the
lips of the dead poet a mockery of death's vanity--a brave assertion of
the glory of life. "Death, death! It is this harping on death I despise
so much," he remarked with emphasis of gesture as well as of speech--the
inclined head and body, the right hand lightly placed upon the
listener's knee, the abrupt change in the inflection of the voice, all
so characteristic of him---"this idle a