had, however, been closed.  The choice seemed to lie between Venice, which was the desire of the city, or, if the difficulties could be overcome by the intervention of Lord Dufferin, the old Florentine cemetery.  The matter was decided otherwise; a grave in Westminster Abbey was proposed by Dean Bradley, and the proposal was accepted.[149] A private service took place in the Palazzo Rezzonico; the coffin, in compliance with the civic requirements, was conveyed with public honours to the chapel on the island of San Michele; and from thence to the house in De Vere Gardens.  On the last day of the year 1889, in presence of a great and reverent crowd, with solemn music arranged for the words of Mrs Browning’s poem, “He giveth his beloved sleep,” the body of Browning was laid in its resting-place in Poets’ Corner.

To attempt at the present time to determine the place of Browning in the history of English poetry is perhaps premature.  Yet the record of “How it strikes a contemporary” may itself have a certain historical interest.  When estimates of this kind have been revised by time even their errors are sometimes instructive, or, if not instructive, are amusing.  It is probable that Tennyson will remain as the chief representative in poetry of the Victorian period.  Browning, who was slower in securing an audience, may be found to possess a more independent individuality.  Yet in truth no great writer is independent of the influences of his age.

Browning as a poet had his origins in the romantic school of English poetry; but he came at a time when the romance of external action and adventure had exhausted itself, and when it became necessary to carry romance into the inner world where the adventures are those of the soul.  On the ethical and religious side he sprang from English Puritanism.  Each of these influences was modified by his own genius and by the circumstances of its development.  His keen observation of facts and passionate inquisition of human character drew him in the direction of what is termed realism.  This combination of realism with romance is even more strikingly seen in an elder contemporary on whose work Browning bestowed an ardent admiration, the novelist Balzac.  His Puritanism received important modifications from his wide-ranging artistic instincts and sympathies, and again from the liberality of a wide-ranging intellect.  He has the strenuous moral force of Puritanism, but he is wholly free from asceticism, except in the higher significance of that word—­the hardy discipline of an athlete.  Opinions count for less than the form and the habitual attitudes of a soul.  These with Browning were always essentially Christian.  He regarded our life on earth as a state of probation and of preparation; sometimes as a battle-field in which our test lies in the choice of the worse or the better side and the energy of devotion to the cause; sometimes as a school of education, in the processes of which the emotions play a larger part than the