“Hush, I pray you! 
    What if this friend happen to be—­God.”

It is the masterpiece of that excellent but much-abused literary quality, Sensationalism.

The volume entitled Pacchiarotto, moreover, includes one or two of the most spirited poems on the subject of the poet in relation to publicity—­“At the Mermaid,” “House,” and “Shop.”

In spite of his increasing years, his books seemed if anything to come thicker and faster.  Two were published in 1878—­La Saisiaz, his great metaphysical poem on the conception of immortality, and that delightfully foppish fragment of the ancien regime, The Two Poets of Croisic.  Those two poems would alone suffice to show that he had not forgotten the hard science of theology or the harder science of humour.  Another collection followed in 1879, the first series of Dramatic Idylls, which contain such masterpieces as “Pheidippides” and “Ivan Ivanovitch.”  Upon its heels, in 1880, came the second series of Dramatic Idylls, including “Muleykeh” and “Clive,” possibly the two best stories in poetry, told in the best manner of story-telling.  Then only did the marvellous fountain begin to slacken in quantity, but never in quality. Jocoseria did not appear till 1883.  It contains among other things a cast-back to his very earliest manner in the lyric of “Never the Time and the Place,” which we may call the most light-hearted love-song that was ever written by a man over seventy.  In the next year appeared Ferishtah’s Fancies, which exhibit some of his shrewdest cosmic sagacity, expressed in some of his quaintest and most characteristic images.  Here perhaps more than anywhere else we see that supreme peculiarity of Browning—­his sense of the symbolism of material trifles.  Enormous problems, and yet more enormous answers, about pain, prayer, destiny, liberty, and conscience are suggested by cherries, by the sun, by a melon-seller, by an eagle flying in the sky, by a man tilling a plot of ground.  It is this spirit of grotesque allegory which really characterises Browning among all other poets.  Other poets might possibly have hit upon the same philosophical idea—­some idea as deep, as delicate, and as spiritual.  But it may be safely asserted that no other poet, having thought of a deep, delicate, and spiritual idea, would call it “A Bean Stripe; also Apple Eating.”

Three more years passed, and the last book which Browning published in his lifetime was Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day, a book which consists of apostrophes, amicable, furious, reverential, satirical, emotional to a number of people of whom the vast majority even of cultivated people have never heard in their lives—­Daniel Bartoli, Francis Furini, Gerard de Lairesse, and Charles Avison.  This extraordinary knowledge of the fulness of history was a thing which never ceased to characterise Browning