and a better trick than that.  Assume the supernatural; have a “mission “; have a “message”; be earnest, with all the authority of a divine purpose.  Play boldly this new card of statesmanship, and you may have from time to time as many inconsistent missions and messages as ambitious statecraft can suggest to you.  Through all your gyrations the admiring crowd will still stand agape.  Was Browning’s irony of a cynical philosophy of statesmanship suggested by his view of the procedure of a politician, whom he had once admired, whose talents he still recognised, but from whom he now turned away with indignant aversion?  However this may have been, his poems which touch on politics do not imply that respect for the people thinking, feeling, and moving, in masses which is a common profession with the liberal leaders of the platform.  Browning’s liberalism was a form of his individualism; he, like Shakespeare, had a sympathy with the wants and affections of the humblest human lives; and, like Shakespeare, he thought that foolish or incompetent heads are often conjoined with hearts that in a high degree deserve respect.

Asolando, the last volume of a long array, was published in London on the last day of Browning’s life.  As he lay dying in Venice, telegraphed tidings reached his son of the eager demand for copies made in anticipation of its appearance and of the instant and appreciative reviews; Browning heard the report with a quiet gratification.  It is happy when praise in departing is justified, and this was the case with a collection of poems which to some readers seemed like a revival of the poetry of its author’s best years of early and mid manhood. Asolando is, however, in the main distinctly an autumn gathering, a handful of flowers and fruit belonging to the Indian summer of his genius.  The Prologue is a confession, like that of Wordsworth’s great Ode, that a glory has passed away from the earth.  When first he set eyes on Asolo, some fifty years previously, the splendour of Italian 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