“Last night I saw you in my sleep: 
        And how your charm of face was changed! 
      I asked ‘Some love, some faith you keep?’
        You answered, ‘Faith gone, love estranged.’

      Whereat I woke—­a twofold bliss: 
        Waking was one, but next there came
      This other:  ’Though I felt, for this,
        My heart break, I loved on the same.’”

Not subtlety, but simplicity, a simplicity pungent as only Browning could make it, is the characteristic of most of the best work in this last volume of a poet preeminently subtle.  This characteristic of simplicity is seen equally in the love-poems and in the poems of satire, in the ballads and in the narrative pieces, and notably in the story of The Pope and the Net, an anecdote in verse, told with the frank relish of the thing, and without the least attempt to tease a moral out of it.

There are other light ballads, as different in merit as Muckle-mouth Meg on the one hand and The Cardinal and the Dog and The Bean-Feast on the other, with snatches of moralising story, as cutting as Arcades Ambo, which is a last word written for love of beasts, and as stinging as The Lady and the Painter, which is a last word written for love of birds and of the beauty of nakedness.  One among these poems, The Cardinal and the Dog, indistinguishable in style from the others, was written fifty years earlier.  It is as if the poet, taking leave of that “British public” which had “loved him not,” and to whose caprices he had never condescended, was, after all, anxious to “part friends.”  The result may be said, in a measure, to have been attained.

So far I wrote in 1889, when Browning was only just dead, and I went on, in words which I keep for their significance to-day, because time has already brought in its revenges, and Browning has conquered.  That Browning, I said then, could ever become a popular poet, in the sense in which Tennyson is popular, must be seen by everyone to be an impossibility.  His poetry is obviously written for his own pleasure, without reference to the tastes of the bulk of readers.  The very titles of his poems, the barest outline of their prevailing subjects, can but terrify or bewilder an easy-going public, which prefers to take its verse somnolently, at the season of the day when the newspaper is too substantial, too exciting.  To appreciate Browning you must read with your eyes wide open.  His poetry is rarely obscure, but it is often hard.  It deals by preference with hard matter, with “men and the ideas of men,” with life and thought.  Other poets before him have written with equally independent aims; but had Milton, had Wordsworth, a larger and more admiring audience in his own day?  If the audience of Milton and of Wordsworth has widened, it would be the merest paradox to speak of either Milton or Wordsworth as a popular poet.  By this time, every one at least knows them by name, though