“Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineffable Name? 
        Builder and maker, thou, of houses not made with hands! 
      What, have fear of change from thee who art ever the same! 
        Doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy power expands? 
      There shall never be one lost good!  What was, shall live as before;
        The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;
      What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;
        On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round.

      All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist;
        Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power
      Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist
        When eternity affirms the conception of an hour. 
      The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
        The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
      Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
        Enough that he heard it once; we shall hear it by-and-by.

      And what is our failure here but a triumph’s evidence
        For the fulness of the days?  Have we withered or agonized? 
      Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence? 
        Why rushed the discord in, but that harmony should be prized? 
      Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear,
        Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe: 
      But God has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear;
        The rest may reason and welcome:  ’tis we musicians know.”

In Rabbi ben Ezra Browning has crystallized his religious philosophy into a shape of abiding beauty.  It has been called, not rashly, the noblest of modern religious poems.  Alike in substance and in form it belongs to the highest order of meditative poetry; and it has, in Browning’s work, an almost unique quality of grave beauty, of severe restraint, of earnest and measured enthusiasm.  What the Psalm of Life is to the people who do not think, Rabbi ben Ezra might and should be to those who do:  a light through the darkness, a lantern of guidance and a beacon of hope, to the wanderers lost and weary in the selva selvaggia.  It is one of those poems that mould character.  I can give only one or two of its most characteristic verses.

      “Not on the vulgar mass
      Called ‘work’ must sentence pass,
      Things done, that took the eye and had the price;
      O’er which, from level stand,
      The low world laid its hand,
      Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice: 

      But all, the world’s coarse thumb
      And finger failed to plumb,
      So passed in making up the main account;
      All instincts immature,
      All purposes unsure,
      That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man’s amount: