“And now a flower is just a flower: 
        Man, bird, beast are but beast, bird, man—­
      Simply themselves, uncinct by dower
        Of dyes which, when life’s day began,
      Round each in glory ran.”

The famous Epilogue is the last cheer of an old warrior in whom the stout fibre of heroism still held out when the finer nerve of vision decayed; but A Reverie shows how heavy a strain it had to endure in sustaining his faith that the world is governed by Love.  Of outward evidence for that conviction Browning saw less and less.  But age had not dimmed his inner witness, and those subtle filaments of mysterious affinity which, for Browning, bound the love of God for man to the love of man for woman, remained unimpaired.  The old man of seventy-seven was still, in his last autumn, singing songs redolent, not of autumn, but of the perfume and the ecstasy of spring and youth,—­love-lyrics so illusively youthful that one, not the least competent, of his critics has refused to accept them as work of his old age.  Yet Now and Summum Bonum, and A Pearl, a Girl, with all their apparent freshness and spontaneity, are less like rapt utterances of passion than eloquent analyses of it by one who has known it and who still vibrates with the memory.  What preoccupies and absorbs him is not the woman, but the wonder of the transfiguration wrought for him by her word or kiss,—­the moment made eternal, the “blaze” in which he became “lord of heaven and earth.”  But some of the greatest love-poetry of the world—­from Dante onwards—­has reflected an intellect similarly absorbed in articulating a marvellous experience.  For the rest, Asolando is a miscellany of old and new,—­bright loose drift from the chance moods of genius, or bits of anecdotic lumber carefully recovered and refurbished, as in prescience of the nearing end.

Yet no such prescience appears to have been his.  His buoyant confidence in his own vitality held its own.  He was full of schemes of work.  At the end of October the idyllic days at Asolo ended, and Browning repaired for the last time to the Palazzo Rezzonico.  A month later he caught a bronchial catarrh; failure of the heart set in, and on the evening of December 12 he peacefully died.  On the last day of the year his body was laid to rest in “Poets’ Corner.”

PART II.

BROWNING’S MIND AND ART

CHAPTER IX.

THE POET.

      Then, who helps more, pray, to repair our loss—­
      Another Boehme with a tougher book
      And subtler meanings of what roses say,—­
      Or some stout Mage, like him of Halberstadt,
      John, who made things Boehme wrote thoughts about? 
      He with a “look you!” vents a brace of rhymes,
      And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,

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