Indeed, he cries, is that the soil in which a poet grows?

    “Rock’s the song-soil rather, surface hard and bare: 
    Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage
      Vainly both expend,—­few flowers awaken there: 
    Quiet in its cleft broods—­what the after-age
    Knows and names a pine, a nation’s heritage.”

In this sharp division, as in his Epilogue to Pacchiarotto, he misses the truth.  It is almost needless to say that a poet can be sensitive to beauty, and also to the stern facts of the moral and spiritual struggle of mankind through evil to good.  All the great poets have been sensitive to both and mingled them in their work.  They were ideal and real in both the flower and the pine.  They are never forced to choose one or other of these aims or lives in their poetry.  They mingled facts and fancies, the intellectual and the imaginative.  They lived in the whole world of the outward and the inward, of the senses and the soul.  Truth and beauty were one to them.  This division of which Browning speaks Was the unfortunate result of that struggle between his intellect and his imagination on which I have dwelt.  In old days it was not so with him.  His early poetry had sweetness with strength, stern thinking with tender emotion, love of beauty with love of truth, idealism with realism, nature with humanity, fancy with fact.  And this is the equipment of the great poet.  When he divides these qualities each from the other, and is only aesthetic or only severe in his realism; only the worshipper of Nature or only the worshipper of human nature; only the poet of beauty or only the poet of austere fact; only the idealist or only the realist; only of the senses or only of the soul—­he may be a poet, but not a great poet.  And as the singular pursuit of the realistic is almost always bound up with pride, because realism does not carry us beyond ourselves into the infinite where we are humbled, the realistic poetry loses imagination; its love of love tends to become self-love, or love of mere cleverness.  And then its poetic elements slowly die.

There was that, as I have said, in Browning which resisted this sad conclusion, but the resistance was not enough to prevent a great loss of poetic power.  But whatever he lost, there was one poetic temper of mind which never failed him, the heroic temper of the faithful warrior for God and man; there was one ideal view of humanity which dominated all his work; there was one principle which directed all his verse to celebrate the struggle of humanity towards the perfection for which God, he believed, had destined it.  These things underlie all the poems in Ferishtah’s Fancies and the Parleyings with Certain People, and give to them the uplifted, noble trumpet note with which at times they are animated.  The same temper and principle, the same view of humanity emerge in that fine lyric which is the Epilogue to Ferishtah’s Fancies, and in the Epilogue to Asolando.