it would be a little unkind to consider too curiously how large a proportion of the people who know them by name have read many consecutive lines of Paradise Lost or The Excursion.  But to be so generally known by name is something, and it has not yet fallen to the lot of Browning.  “Browning is dead,” said a friend of mine, a hunting man, to another hunting man, a friend of his.  “Dear me, is he?” said the other doubtfully; “did he ‘come out’ your way?” By the time Browning has been dead as long as Wordsworth, I do not think anyone will be found to make these remarks.  Death, not only from the Christian standpoint, is the necessary pathway to immortality.  As it is, Browning’s fame has been steadily increasing, at first slowly enough, latterly with even a certain rapidity.  From the first he has had the exceptional admiration of those whose admiration is alone really significant, whose applause can alone be really grateful to a self-respecting writer.  No poet of our day, no poet, perhaps, of any day, has been more secure in the admiring fellowship of his comrades in letters.  And of all the poets of our day, it is he whose influence seems to be most vital at the moment, most pregnant for the future.  For the time, he has also an actual sort of church of his own.  The churches pass, with the passing away of the worshippers; but the spirit remains, and must remain if it has once been so vivid to men, if it has once been a refuge, a promise of strength, a gift of consolation.  And there has been all this, over and above its supreme poetic quality, in the vast and various work, Shakesperean in breadth, Shakesperean in penetration, of the poet whose last words, the appropriate epilogue of a lifetime, were these: 

      “At the midnight, in the silence of the sleep-time,
        When you set your fancies free,
      Will they pass to where—­by death, fools think, imprisoned—­
        Low he lies who once so loved you, whom you loved so,
                    —­Pity me?

Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken! 
What had I on earth to do
With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly? 
Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel
—­Being—­who?

One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.

No, at noonday in the bustle of man’s work-time
Greet the unseen with a cheer! 
Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be,
‘Strive and thrive!’ cry ’Speed,—­fight on, fare ever
There as here!’”

APPENDIX

I

A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT BROWNING