Judgment, according to the vision, is now over.  He who has chosen earth rather than heaven, is allowed his choice:  earth is his for ever.  How the walls of the world shrink and narrow, how the glow fades off from the beauty of nature, of art, of science; how the judged soul prays for only a chance of love, only a hope of ultimate heaven; how the ban is taken off him, and he wakes from the vision on the grey plain as Easter-morn is breaking:  this, with its profound and convincing moral lessons, is told, without a didactic note, in poetry of sustained splendour.  In sheer height of imagination Easter-Day could scarcely exceed the greatest parts of Christmas-Eve, but it preserves a level of more equable splendour, it is a work of art of more chastened workmanship.  In its ethical aspect it is also of special importance, for, while the poet does not necessarily identify himself in all respects with the seer of the vision, the poem enshrines some of Browning’s deepest convictions on life and religion.

15.  MEN AND WOMEN.

    [Published in 1855, in 2 vols.; now dispersed in Vols.  IV.,
    V. and VI. of Poetical Works, 1889.]

The series of Men and Women, fifty-one poems in number, represents Browning’s genius at its ripe maturity, its highest uniform level.  In this central work of his career, every element of his genius is equally developed, and the whole brought into a perfection of harmony never before or since attained.  There is no lack, there is no excess.  I do not say that the poet has not touched higher heights since, or perhaps before; but that he has never since nor before maintained himself so long on so high a height, never exhibited the rounded perfection, the imagination, thought, passion, melody, variety, all fused in one, never produced a single work or group at once so great and so various, admits, I think, of little doubt.  Here are fifty poems, every one of which, in its way, is a masterpiece; and the range is such as no other English poet has perhaps ever covered in a single book of miscellaneous poems.

In Men and Women Browning’s special instrument, the monologue, is brought to perfection.  Such monologues as Andrea del Sarto or the Epistle of Karshish never have been, and probably never will be surpassed, on their own ground, after their own order.  To conceive a drama, to present every side and phase and feature of it from one point of view, to condense all its potentialities of action, all its significance and import, into some few hundred lines, this has been done by but one poet, and nowhere with such absolute perfection as here.  Even when dealing with a single emotion, Browning usually crystallizes it into a choice situation; and almost every poem in the series, down to the smallest lyric, is essentially a dramatic monologue.  But perhaps the most striking instances of the form and method, and, with the little drama of In a Balcony, the principal poems in