It is this that vitiates so much of his poetic reasoning.
Truth may ring regnant in the lines of Abt Vogler --

"And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence
For the fulness of the days?" --

but, unfortunately, the conclusion is, in itself, illogical.

We are all familiar with, and in this book I have dwelt more than once upon,
Browning's habitual attitude towards Death. It is not a novel one.
The frontage is not so much that of the daring pioneer,
as the sedate assurance of `the oldest inhabitant'. It is of good hap,
of welcome significance: none the less there is an aspect of our mortality
of which the poet's evasion is uncompromising and absolute.
I cannot do better than quote Mr. Mortimer's noteworthy words hereupon,
in connection, moreover, with Browning's artistic relation to Sex,
that other great Protagonist in the relentless duel of Humanity
with Circumstance. "The final inductive hazard he declines for himself;
his readers may take it if they will. It is part of the insistent
and perverse ingenuity which we display in masking with illusion
the more disturbing elements of life. Veil after veil is torn down,
but seldom before another has been slipped behind it,
until we acquiesce without a murmur in the concealment
that we ourselves have made. Two facts thus carefully shrouded
from full vision by elaborate illusion conspicuously round in our lives --
the life-giving and life-destroying elements, Sex and Death.
We are compelled to occasional physiologic and economic discussion of the one,
but we shrink from recognising the full extent to which it bases
the whole social fabric, carefully concealing its insurrections,
and ignoring or misreading their lessons. The other, in certain aspects,