Towards December of 1889 he moved to Venice, where he fell ill.  He took very little food; it was indeed one of his peculiar small fads that men should not take food when they are ill, a matter in which he maintained that the animals were more sagacious.  He asserted vigorously that this somewhat singular regimen would pull him through, talked about his plans, and appeared cheerful.  Gradually, however, the talking became more infrequent, the cheerfulness passed into a kind of placidity; and without any particular crisis or sign of the end, Robert Browning died on December 12, 1889.  The body was taken on board ship by the Venice Municipal Guard, and received by the Royal Italian marines.  He was buried in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, the choir singing his wife’s poem, “He giveth His beloved sleep.”  On the day that he died Asolando was published.

CHAPTER VI

BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST

Mr. William Sharp, in his Life of Browning, quotes the remarks of another critic to the following effect:  “The poet’s processes of thought are scientific in their precision and analysis; the sudden conclusion that he imposes upon them is transcendental and inept.”

This is a very fair but a very curious example of the way in which Browning is treated.  For what is the state of affairs?  A man publishes a series of poems, vigorous, perplexing, and unique.  The critics read them, and they decide that he has failed as a poet, but that he is a remarkable philosopher and logician.  They then proceed to examine his philosophy, and show with great triumph that it is unphilosophical, and to examine his logic and show with great triumph that it is not logical, but “transcendental and inept.”  In other words, Browning is first denounced for being a logician and not a poet, and then denounced for insisting on being a poet when they have decided that he is to be a logician.  It is just as if a man were to say first that a garden was so neglected that it was only fit for a boys’ playground, and then complain of the unsuitability in a boys’ playground of rockeries and flower-beds.

As we find, after this manner, that Browning does not act satisfactorily as that which we have decided that he shall be—­a logician—­it might possibly be worth while to make another attempt to see whether he may not, after all, be more valid than we thought as to what he himself professed to be—­a poet.  And if we study this seriously and sympathetically, we shall soon come to a conclusion.  It is a gross and complete slander upon Browning to say that his processes of thought are scientific in their precision and analysis.  They are nothing of the sort; if they were, Browning could not be a good poet.  The critic speaks of the conclusions of a poem as “transcendental and inept”; but the conclusions of a poem, if they are not transcendental, must be inept.  Do the people who call one of