I must survive a thing ere know it dead.

I think Donne will survive all our contemporary criticisms about him.
Ben Jonson said that Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved
hanging. But Donne, though he forgot to keep step with the procession
of poets, has survived many poets who tripped a regular measure. He
has survived even Pope's "versification" of his poems, one of the
most unconsciously humorous things in English literature. Accent
alone will not keep a man alive. Which poet of these latter days
stands the better chance to remain, Francis Thompson, whose
spiritual flame occasionally burned up accent, or Alfred Austin, who
studied to preserve accent through a long life? Accent is indeed
important; but raiment is of little value unless it clothes a living
body. Does Browning's best poetry smell of mortality? Nearly every
new novel I read in English has quotations from Browning without the
marks, sure evidence that the author has read him and assumes that
the readers of the novel have a like acquaintance. When Maeterlinck
wrote his famous play, _Monna Vanna_, he took one of the scenes
directly from Browning's _Luria_: he said that he had been inspired
by Browning: that Browning is one of the greatest poets that England
has ever produced: that to take a scene from him is a kind of public
homage, such as we pay to Homer, Aeschylus, and Shakespeare.

With the exception of Shakespeare, any other English poet could now
be spared more easily than Browning. For, owing to his aim in poetry,
and his success in attaining it, he gave us much vital truth and
beauty that we should seek elsewhere in vain; and, as he said in the
_Epilogue_ to _Pacchiarotio_, the strong, heady wine of his verse
may become sweet in process of time.