we are compelled to face, but to do it we tipple on illusions,
from our cradle upwards, in dread of the coming grave,
purchasing a drug for our poltroonery at the expense of our sanity.
We uphold our wayward steps with the promises and the commandments
for crutches, but on either side of us trudge the shadow Death
and the bacchanal Sex, and we mumble prayers against the one,
while we scourge ourselves for leering at the other.
On one only of these can Browning be said to have spoken with novel force --
the relations of sex, which he has treated with a subtlety and freedom,
and often with a beauty, unapproached since Goethe. On the problem of Death,
except in masquerade of robes and wings, his eupeptic temperament
never allowed him to dwell. He sentimentalised where Shakespeare thought."
Browning's whole attitude to the Hereafter is different from that of Tennyson
only in that the latter `faintly', while he strenuously,
"trusts the larger hope." To him all credit, that, standing upon
the frontiers of the Past, he can implicitly trust the Future.

"High-hearted surely he;
But bolder they who first off-cast
Their moorings from the habitable Past."

The teacher may be forgotten, the prophet may be hearkened to no more,
but a great poet's utterance is never temporal, having that in it
which conserves it against the antagonism of time, and the ebb and flow
of literary ideals. What range, what extent of genius!
As Mr. Frederick Wedmore has well said, `Browning is not a book --
he is a literature.'

But that he will "stand out gigantic" in MASS of imperishable work,
in that far-off day, I for one cannot credit. His poetic shortcomings