and thus as Clive’s fear was courage, as Ivan’s violation of law was obedience to law, so Hoseyn’s loss is Hoseyn’s gain.  In each case Browning’s casuistry is not argumentative; it lies in an appeal to some passion or some intuition that is above our common levels of passion or of insight, and his power of uplifting his reader for even a moment into this higher mood is his special gift as a poet.  We can return safely enough to the common ground, but we return with a possession which instructs the heart.

A mood of acquiescence, which does not displace the moods of aspiration and of combat but rather floats above them as an atmosphere, was growing familiar to Browning in these his elder years.  He had sought for truth, and had now found all that earth was likely to yield him, of which not the least important part was a conviction that much of our supposed knowledge ends in a perception of our ignorance.  He was now disposed to accept what seemed to be the providential order that truth and error should mingle in our earthly life, that truth should be served by illusion; he would not rearrange the disposition of things if he could.  He was inclined to hold by the simple certainties of our present life and to be content with these as provisional truths, or as temporary illusions which lead on towards the truth.  In the Pisgah Sights of the Pacchiarotto volume he had imagined this mood of acquiescence as belonging to the hour of death.  But old age in reality is an earlier stage in the process of dying, and with all his ardour and his energy, Browning was being detached from the contentions and from some of the hopes and aspirations of life.  And because he was detached he could take the world to his heart, though in a different temper from that of youth or middle age; he could limit his view to things that are near, because their claim upon his passions had diminished while their claim upon his tenderness had increased.  He could smile amiably, for to the mood of acquiescence a smile seems to be worth more than an argument.  He could recall the thoughts of love, and reanimate them in his imagination, and could love love with the devotion of an old man to the most precious of the things that have been.  Some of an old man’s jests may be found in Jocoseria, some of an old man’s imaginative passion in Asolando, and in both volumes, and still more clearly in Ferishtah’s Fancies may be seen an old man’s spirit of acquiescence, or to use a catch-word of Matthew Arnold, the epoch of concentration which follows an epoch of expansion.  But the embrace of earth and the things of earth is like the embrace, with a pathos in its ardour, which precedes a farewell.  From the first he had recognised the danger on the one hand of settling down to browse contentedly in the paddock of our earthly life, and on the other hand the danger of ignoring our limitations, the danger of attempting to “thrust in earth eternity’s concerns.”  In his earlier years he had