The further interest lies in the lordly acknowledgment of the dedication to him of “Luria,” which Landor sent to Browning—­lines pregnant with the stateliest music of his old age:—­

     “Shakespeare is not our poet but the world’s,
      Therefore on him no speech! and brief for thee,
      Browning!  Since Chaucer was alive and hale
      No man has walked along our roads with step
      So active, so enquiring eye, or tongue
      So varied in discourse.  But warmer climes
      Give brighter plumage, stronger wing:  the breeze
      Of Alpine heights thou playest with, borne on
      Beyond Sorrento and Amalfi, where
      The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.”

CHAPTER V.

In my allusion to “Pippa Passes,” towards the close of the preceding chapter, as the most imperishable because the most nearly immaculate of Browning’s dramatic poems, I would not have it understood that its pre-eminence is considered from the standpoint of technical achievement, of art, merely.  It seems to me, like all simple and beautiful things, profound enough for the searching plummet of the most curious explorer of the depths of life.  It can be read, re-read, learned by heart, and the more it is known the wider and more alluring are the avenues of imaginative thought which it discloses.  It has, more than any other long composition by its author, that quality of symmetry, that symmetria prisca recorded of Leonardo da Vinci in the Latin epitaph of Platino Piatto; and, as might be expected, its mental basis, what Rossetti called fundamental brain-work, is as luminous, depth within depth, as the morning air.  By its side, the more obviously “profound” poems, Bishop Blougram and the rest, are mere skilled dialectics.

The art that is most profound and most touching must ever be the simplest.  Whenever AEschylus, Dante, Shakspere, Milton, are at white heat they require no exposition, but meditation only—­the meditation akin to the sentiment of little children who listen, intent upon every syllable, and passionately eager of soul, to hearth-side tragedies.  The play of genius is like the movement of the sea.  It has its solemn rhythm:  its joy, irradiate of the sun; its melancholy, in the patient moonlight:  its surge and turbulence under passing tempests:  below all, the deep oceanic music.  There are, of course, many to whom the sea is but a waste of water, at best useful as a highway and as the nursery of the winds and rains.  For them there is no hint “of the incommunicable dream” in the curve of the rising wave, no murmur of the oceanic undertone in the short leaping sounds, invisible things that laugh and clap their hands for joy and are no more.  To them it is but a desert:  obscure, imponderable, a weariness.  The “profundity” of Browning, so dear a claim in the eyes of the poet’s fanatical admirers, exists, in their sense, only in his inferior work.  There is more profound insight in Blake’s Song of Innocence, “Piping down the valleys wild,” or in Wordsworth’s line, “Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,” or in Keats’ single verse, “There is a budding morrow in midnight,” or in this quatrain on Poetry, by a young living poet—­