o which it
bases the whole social fabric carefully concealing its insurrections,
and ignoring or misreading their lessons. The other, in certain aspects,
we are compelled to face, but to do it we tipple on illusions, from our
cradle upwards, in dread of the coming grave, purchasing a drug for our
poltroonery at the expense of our sanity. We uphold our wayward steps
with the promises and the commandments for crutches, but on either side
of us trudge the shadow Death and the bacchanal Sex, and we mumble
prayers against the one, while we scourge ourselves for leering at the
other. On one only of these can Browning be said to have spoken with
novel force--the relations of sex, which he has treated with a subtlety
and freedom, and often with a beauty, unapproached since Goethe. On the
problem of Death, except in masquerade of robes and wings, his eupeptic
temperament never allowed him to dwell. He sentimentalised where
Shakspere thought." Browning's whole attitude to the Hereafter is
different from that of Tennyson only in that the latter 'faintly,' while
he strenuously, "trusts the larger hope." To him all credit, that,
standing upon the frontiers of the Past, he can implicitly trust the
Future.

"High-hearted surely he;
But bolder they who first off-cast
Their moorings from the habitable Past."

The teacher may be forgotten, the prophet may be hearkened to no more,
but a great poet's utterance is never temporal, having that in it which
conserves it against the antagonism of time, and the ebb and flow of
literary ideals. What range, what extent of genius! As Mr. Frederick
Wedmore has well said, 'Browning is not a book--he is a literature.'

But that he will "stand out gigantic" in _mass_ of imperishable work,
in that far-off day, I for one cannot credit. His poetic shortcomings seem
too essential to permit of this. That fatal excess of cold over emotive
thought, of thought that, however profound, incisive, or scrupulously
clear, is not yet impassioned, is a fundamental defect of his. It is the
very impetuosity of this mental energy to which is due the miscalled
obscurity of much of Browning's work--miscalled, because, however remote
in his allusions, however pedantic even, he is never obscure in his
thought. His is that "palace infinite which darkens with excess of
light." But mere excess in itself is nothing more than symptomatic.
Browning has suffered more from intellectual exploitation than any
write