The poet, sitting silent in the room where his wife sits with him, sees all his life with her unrolled, muses on what has been, and is, since she came to bless his life, or what will be, since she continues to bless it; and all the fancies and musings which, in a usual love lyric, would not harmonise with the intensity of love-passion in youth, exactly fit in with the peace and satisfied joy of a married life at home with God and nature and itself.  The poem is full of personal charm.  Quiet thought, profound feeling and sweet memory like a sunlit mist, soften the aspect of the room, the image of his wife, and all the thoughts, emotions and scenery described.  It is a finished piece of art.

The second of these poems is the Epilogue to the volumes of Men and Women, entitled One Word More.  It also is a finished piece of art, carefully conceived, upbuilded stone by stone, touch by touch, each separate thought with its own emotion, each adding something to the whole, each pushing Browning’s emotion and picture into our souls, till the whole impression is received.  It is full, and full to the brim, with the long experience of peaceful joy in married love.  And the subtlety of the close of it, and of Browning’s play with his own fancy about the moon, do not detract from the tenderness of it; for it speaks not of transient passion but of the love of a whole life lived from end to end in music.

The last of these is entitled Prospice.  When he wrote it he had lost his wife.  It tells what she had made of him; it reveals alike his steadfast sadness that she had gone from him and the steadfast resolution, due to her sweet and enduring power, with which, after her death, he promised, bearing with him his sorrow and his memory of joy, to stand and withstand in the battle of life, ever a fighter to the close—­and well he kept his word.  It ends with the expression of his triumphant certainty of meeting her, and breaks forth at last into so great a cry of pure passion that ear and heart alike rejoice.  Browning at his best, Browning in the central fire of his character, is in it.

    Fear death?—­to feel the fog in my throat,
      The mist in my face,
    When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
      I am nearing the place,
    The power of the night, the press of the storm,
      The post of the foe;
    Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
      Yet the strong man must go: 
    For the journey is done and the summit attained
      And the barriers fall,
    Though a battle’s to fight ere the guerdon be gained,
      The reward of it all. 
    I was ever a fighter, so—­one fight more,
      The best and the last! 
    I would hate that Death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,
      And bade me creep past. 
    No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers
      The heroes of old,
    Bear the brunt, in a minute