We are all familiar with, and in this book I have dwelt more than once upon, Browning’s habitual attitude towards Death.  It is not a novel one.  The frontage is not so much that of the daring pioneer, as the sedate assurance of ‘the oldest inhabitant.’  It is of good hap, of welcome significance:  none the less there is an aspect of our mortality of which the poet’s evasion is uncompromising and absolute.  I cannot do better than quote Mr. Mortimer’s noteworthy words hereupon, in connection, moreover, with Browning’s artistic relation to Sex, that other great Protagonist in the relentless duel of Humanity with Circumstance.  “The final inductive hazard he declines for himself; his readers may take it if they will.  It is part of the insistent and perverse ingenuity which we display in masking with illusion the more disturbing elements of life.  Veil after veil is torn down, but seldom before another has been slipped behind it, until we acquiesce without a murmur in the concealment that we ourselves have made.  Two facts thus carefully shrouded from full vision by elaborate illusion conspicuously round in our lives—­the life-giving and life-destroying elements, Sex and Death.  We are compelled to occasional physiologic and economic discussion of the one, but we shrink from recognising the full extent to which it bases the whole social fabric carefully concealing its insurrections, and ignoring or misreading their lessons.  The other, in certain aspects, we are compelled to face, but to do it we tipple on illusions, from our cradle upwards, in dread of the coming grave, purchasing a drug for our poltroonery at the expense of our sanity.  We uphold our wayward steps with the promises and the commandments for crutches, but on either side of us trudge the shadow Death and the bacchanal Sex, and we mumble prayers against the one, while we scourge ourselves for leering at the other.  On one only of these can Browning be said to have spoken with novel force—­the relations of sex, which he has treated with a subtlety and freedom, and often with a beauty, unapproached since Goethe.  On the problem of Death, except in masquerade of robes and wings, his eupeptic temperament never allowed him to dwell.  He sentimentalised where Shakspere thought.”  Browning’s whole attitude to the Hereafter is different from that of Tennyson only in that the latter ‘faintly,’ while he strenuously, “trusts the larger hope.”  To him all credit, that, standing upon the frontiers of the Past, he can implicitly trust the Future.

     “High-hearted surely he;
      But bolder they who first off-cast
      Their moorings from the habitable Past.”

The teacher may be forgotten, the prophet may be hearkened to no more, but a great poet’s utterance is never temporal, having that in it which conserves it against the antagonism of time, and the ebb and flow of literary ideals.  What range, what extent of genius!  As Mr. Frederick Wedmore has well said, ‘Browning is not a book—­he is a literature.’