sses are to Shakspere, as the laboured inversions of
his blank verse are to Milton, as his austere concision is to Dante.
Meanwhile, to the more exigent among us at any rate, the flaws seem
flaws, and in nowise essential.

But when we find weighty message and noble utterance in union, as we do
in the magnificent remainder after even the severest ablation of the
poor and mediocre portion of Browning's life-work, how beneficent seem
the generous gods! Of this remainder most aptly may be quoted these
lines from "The Ring and the Book,"

"Gold as it was, is, shall be evermore;
Prime nature with an added artistry."

How gladly, in this dubious hour--when, as an eminent writer has phrased
it, a colossal Hand, which some call the hand of Destiny and others that
of Humanity, is putting out the lights of Heaven one by one, like
candles after a feast--how gladly we listen to this poet with his serene
faith in God, and immortal life, and the soul's unending development!
"Hope hard in the subtle thing that's Spirit," he cries in the Prologue
to "Pacchiarotto": and this, in manifold phrasing, is his
_leit-motif_, his fundamental idea, in unbroken line from the
"Pauline" of his twenty-first to the "Asolando" of his seventy-sixth year.
This superb phalanx of faith--what shall prevail against it?

How winsome it is, moreover: this, and the humanity of his song.
Profoundly he realised that there is no more significant study than the
human heart. "The development of a soul: little else is worth study," he
wrote in his preface to "Sordello": so in his old age, in his last
"Reverie"--

"As the record from youth to age
Of my own, the single soul--
So the world's wide book: one page
Deciphered explains the whole
Of our common heritage."

He had faith also that "the record from youth to age" of his own soul
would outlast any present indifference or neglect--that whatever tide
might bear him away from our regard for a time would ere long flow
again. The reaction must come: it is, indeed, already at hand. But one
almost fancies one can hear the gathering of the remote waters once
more. We may, with Strafford,

"feel sure
That Time, who in the twilight comes to mend
All the fantastic day's caprice, consign
To the low ground once more the ignoble Term,
And raise the Genius on his orb again,--
That Time will do me right." ...