“Each life unfulfilled, you see;
        It hangs still, patchy and scrappy,
      We have not sighed deep, laughed free,
        Starved, feasted, despaired,—­been happy.”

It is no accident that with the clearer recognition of sharp and absolute loss Browning shows increasing preoccupation with the thought of recovery after death.  For himself death was now inseparably intertwined with all that he had known of love, and the prospect of the supreme reunion which death, as he believed, was to bring him, drew it nearer to the core of his imagination and passion.  Not that he looked forward to it with the easy complacency of the hymn-writer. Prospice would not be the great uplifting song it is were the note of struggle, of heroic heart to bear the brunt and pay in one moment all “life’s arrears of pain, darkness, and cold,” less clearly sounded; and were the final cry less intense with the longing of bereavement.  How near this thought of rapturous reunion lay to the springs of Browning’s imagination at this time, how instantly it leapt into poetry, may be seen from the Eurydice to Orpheus which he fitly placed immediately after these—­

     “But give them me, the mouth, the eyes, the brow! 
       Let them once more absorb me!”

But in two well-known poems of the Dramatis Personae Browning has splendidly unfolded what is implicit in the strong simple clarion—­note of Prospice. Abt Vogler and Rabbi ben Ezra are among the surest strongholds of his popular fame. Rabbi ben Ezra is a great song of life, bearing more fully perhaps than any other poem the burden of what he had to say to his generation, but lifted far above mere didacticism by the sustained glow in which ethical passion, and its imaginative splendour, indistinguishably blend.  It is not for nothing that Browning put this loftiest utterance of all that was most strenuous in his own faith into the mouth of a member of the race which has beyond others known how to suffer and how to transfigure its suffering.  Ben Ezra’s thoughts are not all Hebraic, but they are conceived in the most exalted temper of Hebrew prophecy; blending the calm of achieved wisdom with the fervour of eagerly accepted discipline, imperious scorn for the ignorance of fools, and heroic ardour, for the pangs and throes of the fray.  Ideals which, coolly analysed, seem antithetical, and which have in reality inspired opposite ways of life, meet in the fusing flame of the Rabbi’s impassioned thought:  the body is the soul’s beguiling sorceress, but also its helpful comrade; man is the passive clay which the great Potter moulded and modelled upon the Wheel of Time, and yet is bidden rage and strive, the adoring acquiescence of Eastern Fatalism mingling with the Western gospel of individual energy.  And all this complex and manifold ethical appeal is conveyed in verse of magnificent volume and resonance, effacing by the swift recurrent anvil crash of its rhythm any suggestion that the acquiescence of the “clay” means passivity.