r than the general reader who will
find most to please him in "this attempt to give our language the
similitude of Greek by close and sustained grappling, word to word, with
so sublime and difficult a masterpiece."[54]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 54: J.A. Symonds, _Academy_, Nov. 10, 1877.]

26. LA SAISIAZ: THE TWO POETS OF CROISIC.

[Published in May, 1878. _La Saisiaz_ (written November,
1877), pp. 1-82; _The Two Poets of Croisic_, pp. 83-201.
(_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. XIV. pp. 153-204, 205-279).]

In _La Saisiaz_ Browning reasons of God and the soul, of life here and
of life to come. The poem is addressed to a friend of old date, who died
suddenly while she was staying with Browning and his sister, in the
summer of 1877, at a villa called La Saisiaz (The Sun) in the mountains
near Geneva. The first twenty pages tell the touching story; the rest of
the poem records the argument which it called forth. "Was ending ending
once and always, when you died?" Browning asks himself, and he attempts
to answer the question, not on traditional grounds, or on the authority
of a creed, but by honest reasoning. He assumes two postulates, and two
only, that God exists and that the soul exists; and he proceeds to show,
very forcibly, the unsatisfactory nature of life if consciousness ends
with death, and its completely satisfactory nature if the soul's
existence continues.

"Without the want,
Life, now human, would be brutish: just that hope, however scant,
Makes the actual life worth leading; take the hope therein away,
All we have to do is surely not endure another day.
This life has its hopes for this life, hopes that promise joy:
life done--
Out of all the hopes, how many had complete fulfilment? none.
'But the soul is not the body': and the breath is not the flute;
Both together make the music: either marred and all is mute."

This hypothesis is purely personal, and as such he holds it. But, to his
own mind at least, he finds that

"Sorrow did and joy did nowise,--life well weighed--preponderate.
By necessity ordained thus? I shall bear as best I can;
By a cause all-good, all-wise, all-potent? No, as I am man!"

Yet, if only the assumption of a future life may be made, he will
thankfully acquiesce in an earthly failure, which will then be only
relative, and the earnest of a heavenly gain. Having arrived at this