publication of _The Ring and the Book_, in 1868,
he was at last recognized by his countrymen as one of the greatest of
English poets. He died in Venice, on December 12, 1889, the same day that
saw the publication of his last work, _Asolando_. Though Italy offered him
an honored resting place, England claimed him for her own, and he lies
buried beside Tennyson in Westminster Abbey. The spirit of his whole life
is magnificently expressed in his own lines, in the Epilogue of his last
book:

One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, tho' right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.

WORKS. A glance at even the titles which Browning gave to his best known
volumes--_Dramatic Lyrics_ (1842), _Dramatic Romances and Lyrics_ (1845),
_Men and Women_ (1853), _Dramatis Persona_ (1864)--will suggest how strong
the dramatic element is in all his work. Indeed, all his poems may be
divided into three classes,--pure dramas, like _Strafford_ and _A Blot in
the 'Scutcheon_; dramatic narratives, like _Pippa Passes_, which are
dramatic in form, but were not meant to be acted; and dramatic lyrics, like
_The Last Ride Together_, which are short poems expressing some strong
personal emotion, or describing some dramatic episode in human life, and in
which the hero himself generally tells the story.

Though Browning is often compared with Shakespeare, the reader will
understand that he has very little of Shakespeare's dramatic talent. He
cannot bring a group of people together and let the actions and words of
his characters show us the comedy and tragedy of human life. Neither can
the author be disinterested, satisfied, as Shakespeare was, with life
itself, without drawing any moral conclusions. Browning has always a moral
ready, and insists upon giving us his own views of life, which Shakespeare
never does. His dramatic power lies in depicting what he himself calls the
history of a soul. Sometimes, as in _Paracelsus_, he endeavors to trace the
progress of the human spirit. More often he takes some dramatic moment in
life, some crisis in the ceaseless struggle between good and evil, and
describes with wonderful insight the hero's own thoughts and feelings; but
he almost invariably tells us how, at such and such a point, the good or
the evil in his hero must inevitably have t