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 poem, with its suggestive title, is not argumentative.  The sense of “the pity of it” in one heart, remorse which has somehow come into existence out of the obscure storehouse of nature, or out of God, is the only justification suggested for a hope that nature or God must at the last intend good and not evil to the poor defeated abjects, who most abhorred their lives in Paris yesterday.  And the word “Nature” here would be rejected by Browning as less than the truth.