_Reverie_, in _Rephan_, and in other poems, the
teachings of a lifetime are enforced with a final emphasis, there is
the same joyous readiness to "aspire yet never attain;" the same delight
in the beauty and strangeness of life, in the "wild joy of living," in
woman, in art, in scholarship; and in _Rosny_ we have the vision of a
hero dead on the field of victory, with the comment, "That is best."

To those who value Browning, not as the poet of metaphysics, but as the
poet of life, his last book will be singularly welcome. Something like
metaphysics we find, indeed, but humanised, made poetry, in the blank
verse of _Development_, the lyrical verse of the _Prologue_, and the
third of the _Bad Dreams_, with their subtle comments and surmises on
the relations of art with nature, of nature with truth. But it is life
itself, a final flame, perhaps mortally bright, that burns and shines in
the youngest of Browning's books. The book will be not less welcome to
those who feel that the finest poetic work is usually to be found in
short pieces, and that even _The Ring and the Book_ would scarcely be an
equivalent for the fifty _Men and Women_ of those two incomparable
volumes of 1855. Nor is _Asolando_ without a further attractiveness to
those who demand in poetry a certain fleeting and evanescent grace.

"Car nous voulons la Nuance encor,
Pas la Couleur, rien que la Nuance,"

as Paul Verlaine says, somewhat exclusively, in his poetical confession
of faith. It is, indeed, _la Nuance_, the last fine shade, that Browning
has captured and fixed for us in those lovely love-poems, _Summum
Bonum_, _Poetics_, _a Pearl, a Girl_, and the others, so young-hearted,
so joyous and buoyant; and in the woody piping of _Flute Music, with an
Accompaniment_. Simple and eager in _Dubiety_, daintily, prettily
pathetic in _Humility_, more intense in _Speculative_, in the fourteen
lines called _Now_, the passion of the situation leaps like a cry from
the heart, and one may say that the poem is, rather than renders, the
very fever of the supreme moment, "the moment eternal."

"Now.

Out of your whole life give but a moment:
All of your life that has gone before,
All to come after it,--so you ignore,
So you make perfect the present,--condense,
In a rapture of rage, for perfection's endowment,
Thought and feeling and soul and sense--
Merged in a moment which give