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 intellectual errors and illusions without their educational value.  It is better, as Development, with its recollections of Browning’s childhood, assures us that the boy should believe in Troy siege, and the combats of Hector and Achilles, as veritable facts of history, than bend his brow over Wolfs Prolegomena or perplex his brain with moral philosophies to grapple with which his mind is not yet competent.  By and by his illusions will disappear while their gains will remain.

The general impression left by Asolando is that of intellectual and imaginative vigour.  The series of Bad Dreams is very striking and original in both pictorial and passionate power. Dubiety is a poem of the Indian Summer, but it has the beauty, with a touch of the pathos, proper to the time.  The love songs are rather songs of praise than of passion, but they are beautiful songs of praise, and that entitled Speculative, which is frankly a poem of old age, has in it the genuine passion of memory. White Witchcraft does in truth revive the manner of earlier volumes.  The

    Infinite passion and the pain
    Of finite hearts that yearn

told of in a poem of 1855 is present, with a touch of humour to guard it from its own excess in the admirable Inapprehensiveness.  The speaker who may not liberate his soul can perhaps identify a quotation, and he gallantly accepts his humble role in the tragi-comedy of foiled passion:—­