iot of the Sun" from a piece of broken wheel and some
similar fragment buried in the adjoining ground.

The remembrance converts itself into a question: the poet's fancy no
longer peoples the earth with gods and goddesses; has his insight become
less vivid? has the poetic spirit gone back? The answer is unwavering;
retrogression is not in the creative plan. The poet does not go back. He
is still as of yore a seer; he has only changed in this, that his chosen
visions are of the soul; their objects are no longer visible
unrealities, but the realities which are unseen. He can still, if he
pleases, evoke those as these, and Mr. Browning proceeds to show it by
calling up a series of dissolving views representing another "walk."

A majestic and varied landscape unfolds before us in the changing lights
of a long summer's day; and at each appropriate artistic moment becomes
the background of a mythological, idyllic, or semi-mythical scene. In
the early dawn we see Prometheus amidst departing thunders chained to
his rock:[131] the glutted, yet still hungering vulture cowering beside
him; in the dews of morning, Artemis triumphant in her double character
of huntress-queen and goddess of sudden death; in the heats of noon,
Lyda and the Satyr, enacting the pathetic story of his passion and her
indifference;[132] in the lengthening shadows, the approaching shock of
the armies of Darius and Alexander;[133]--in the falling night, a dim,
silent, deprecating figure: in other words, a ghost.

And here Mr. Browning bids the "fooling" stop; for he has touched the
point of extreme divergence between the classic spirit and his own. The
pallid vision which he repels speaks dumbly of pagan regret for what is
past, of pagan hopelessness of the to-come. _His_ religion, as we are
again reminded, is one of hope. Let us, he says, do and not dream, look
forward and not back; ascend the tree of existence into its ripening
glory, not hastening over leaf or blossom, not dallying with them; leave
Greek lore buried in its own ashes, and accept the evidence of life
itself that extinction is impossible; that death--mystery though it is,
calamity though it may be--ends nothing which has once begun. We may
then greet the spring which we do not live to see in other words than
those of the Greek bard; and the words suggested are those of a dainty
lyric, in which the note of gladness seems to break with a little sob,
and rings, perhaps, on that account the tru