By the evening of the 28th day of the month she was in sore peril of failing breath.  All night her husband sat by her, holding her hand.  Two hours before dawn she realised that her last breath would ere long fall upon his tear-wet face.  Then, as a friend has told us, she passed into a state of ecstasy:  yet not so rapt therein but that she could whisper many words of hope, even of joy.  With the first light of the new day, she leaned against her lover.  Awhile she lay thus in silence, and then, softly sighing “It is beautiful!” passed like the windy fragrance of a flower.

CHAPTER IX.

It is needless to dwell upon what followed.  The world has all that need be known.  To Browning himself it was the abrupt, the too deeply pathetic, yet not wholly unhappy ending of a lovelier poem than any he or another should ever write, the poem of their married life.

There is a rare serenity in the thought of death when it is known to be the gate of life.  This conviction Browning had, and so his grief was rather that of one whose joy has westered earlier.  The sweetest music of his life had withdrawn:  but there was still music for one to whom life in itself was a happiness.  He had his son, and was not void of other solace:  but even had it been otherwise he was of the strenuous natures who never succumb, nor wish to die—­whatever accident of mortality overcome the will and the power.

It was in the autumn following his wife’s death that he wrote the noble poem to which allusion has already been made:  “Prospice.”  Who does not thrill to its close, when all of gloom or terror

“Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul!  I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest.”

There are few direct allusions to his wife in Browning’s poems.  Of those prior to her death the most beautiful is “One Word More,” which has been already quoted in part:  of the two or three subsequent to that event none surpasses the magic close of the first part of “The Ring and the Book.”

Thereafter the details of his life are public property.  He all along lived in the light, partly from his possession of that serenity which made Goethe glad to be alive and to be able to make others share in that gladness.  No poet has been more revered and more loved.  His personality will long be a stirring tradition.  In the presence of his simple manliness and wealth of all generous qualities one is inclined to pass by as valueless, as the mere flying spray of the welcome shower, the many honours and gratifications that befell him.  Even if these things mattered, concerning one by whose genius we are fascinated, while undazzled by the mere accidents pertinent thereto, their recital would be wearisome—­of how he was asked to be Lord Rector of this University, or made a doctor of laws at that:  of how letters and tributes of all kinds came to him from every district in our Empire, from every country in the world:  and so forth.  All these things are implied in the circumstance that his life was throughout “a noble music with a golden ending.”