s but on
every faint desire and unaccomplished purpose, and not only on
achievements but failures. Possessed of such knowledge, tried in the
probation of life and not found wanting, accepting its own peculiar
trials, old age can enter into the rest of a clear and solemn vision,
confident of being qualified at last to start forth upon that "adventure
brave and new" to which death is a summons, and assured through
experience that the power which gives our life its law is equalled by a
superintending love. Ardour, and not lethargy, progress and not decline,
are here represented as the characteristics of extreme old age. An
enthusiasm of effort and of strenuous endurance, an enthusiasm of rest
in knowledge, an enthusiasm of self-abandonment to God and the divine
purpose make up the poem. At no time did Browning write verse which
soars with a more steadfast and impassioned libration of wing. Death in
_Rabbi Ben Ezra_ is death as a friend. In the lines entitled _Prospice_
it is death the adversary that is confronted and conquered; the poem is
an act of the faith which comes through love; it is ascribed to no
imaginary speaker, and does not, indeed, veil its personal character. No
lonely adventure is here to reward the victor over death; the
transcendent joy is human love recovered, which being once recovered,
let whatever God may please succeed. The verses are a confession which
gives the reason of that gallant beating up against the wind, noticeable
in many of Browning's later poems. He could not cease from hope; but
hope and faith had much to encounter, and sometimes he would reduce the
grounds of his hope to the lowest, as if to make sure against illusion
and to test the fortitude of hope even at its weakest. The hope of
immortality which was his own inevitably extended itself beyond himself,
and became an interpreter of the mysteries of our earthly life. In
contrast with the ardent ideality of _Rabbi Ben Ezra_ may be set the
uncompromising realism of _Apparent Failure_, with its poetry of the
Paris morgue. The lover of life will scrutinise death at its ugliest and
worst, blinking no hideous fact. Yet, even so, the reverence for
humanity--

Poor men, God made, and all for that!--

is not quenched, nor is the hope quenched that

After Last returns the First,
Though a wide compass round be fetched,
That what began best, can't end worst.

The optimism is unreasoned, and rightly so, for the spirit of the