landscape seemed
that of

Terror with beauty, like the Bush
Burning yet unconsumed

Now, while the beauty remains, the flame is extinct--"the Bush is bare."
Browning finds his consolation in the belief that he has come nearer to
the realities of earth by discarding fancies, and that his wonder and
awe are more wisely directed towards the transcendent God than towards
His creatures. But in truth what the mind confers is a fact and no
fancy; the loss of what Browning calls the "soul's iris-bow" is the loss
of a substantial, a divine possession. The _Epilogue_ has in it a
certain energy, but the thews are those of an old athlete, and through
the energy we are conscious of the strain. The speaker pitches his voice
high, as if it could not otherwise be heard at a distance. The
_Reverie_, a speculation on the time when Power will show itself fully
and therefore be known as love, has some of that vigorous intellectual
garrulity which had grown on Browning during the years when unhappily
for his poetry he came to be regarded chiefly as a prophet and a sage.
An old man rightly values the truths which experience has made real for
him; he repeats them again and again, for they constitute the best gift
he can offer to his disciples; but his utterances are not always
directly inspired; they are sometimes faintly echoed from an earlier
inspiration. In the _Reverie_, while accepting our limitations of
knowledge, which he can term ignorance in its contrast with the vast
unknown, Browning discovers in the moral consciousness of man a prophecy
of the ultimate triumph of good over what we think of as evil, a
prophecy of the final reconciliation of love with power. And among the
laws of life is not merely submission but aspiration:

Life is--to wake not sleep,
Rise and not rest, but press
From earth's level where blindly creep
Things perfected, more or less,
To the heaven's height, far and steep,
Where amid what strifes and storms
May wait the adventurous quest,
Power is love.

The voice of the poet of _Paracelsus_ and of _Rabbi Ben Ezra_ is still
audible in this latest of his prophesyings. And therefore he welcomes
earth in his _Rephan_, earth, with its whole array of failures and
despairs, as the fit training-ground for man. Better its trials and
losses and crosses than a sterile uniformity of happiness; better its
strife than rest in any golden mean of excellence. Nor are its
intellect