such was fortunate, yet each of old
Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.

There they stood, ranged along the hillside, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! in a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set.
And blew. "_Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came_."

There, if anywhere in literature, is the summit of tragic and triumphant
music. There, it seems to me, is as profound and imaginative expression
of the heroic spirit as is to be found in the English language.

To belittle Browning as an artist after such a poem is to blaspheme
against art. To belittle him as an optimist is to play the fool with
words. Browning was an optimist only in the sense that he believed in
what Stevenson called "the ultimate decency of things," and that he
believed in the capacity of the heroic spirit to face any test devised
for it by inquisitors or devils. He was not defiant in a fine attitude
like Byron. His defiance was rather a form of magnanimity. He is said,
on Robert Buchanan's authority, to have thundered "No," when in his
later years he was asked if he were a Christian. But his defiance was
the defiance of a Christian, the dauntlessness of a knight of the Holy
Ghost. Perhaps it is that he was more Christian than the Christians.
Like the Pope in _The Ring and the Book_, he loathed the association of
Christianity with respectability. Some readers are bewildered by his
respectability in trivial things, such as dress, into failing to see his
hatred of respectability when accepted as a standard in spiritual
things. He is more sympathetic towards the disreputable suicides in
_Apparent Failure_ than towards the vacillating and respectable lovers
in _The Statue and the Bust._ There was at least a hint of heroism in
the last madness of the doomed men. Browning again and again protests,
as Blake had done earlier, against the mean moral values of his age.
Energy to him as to Blake meant endless delight, and especially those
two great energies of the spirit--love and heroism. For, though his work
is not a philosophic expression of moral ideas, it is an imaginative
expression of moral ideas, as a result of which he is, above all, the
poet of lovers and heroes. Imagination is a caged bird in these days;
with Browning it was a soaring eagle. In some ways Mr. Conrad's is the
most heroic imagination in contemporary liter