* *

That what began best can't end worst,
Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst."

He has no fear of death; he will face it gladly, in confidence of the
life beyond. His Grammarian is content to assume an order of things
which will justify in the next life his ceaseless toil in this, merely
to learn how to live. Rabbi Ben Ezra's old age is serene in the hope
of the continuity of life and the eternal development of character; he
finds life good, and the plan of things perfect. In brief, Browning
accepts life as it is, and believes it good, piecing out his
conception of the goodness of life by drawing without limit upon his
hopes of the other world. With the exception of a few poems like
_Andrea del Sarto_, this is the unbroken tone of his poetry.
Calvinism, asceticism, pessimism in any form, he rejects. He sustains
his position not by argument, but by hope and assertion. It is a
matter of temperament: he is optimistic because he was born so.
Different from the serene optimism of Shakespeare's later life, in
_The Tempest_ and _The Winter's Tale_, in that it is
not, like Shakespeare's, born of long and deep suffering from the
contemplation of the tragedies of human life, it bears, in that
degree, less of solace and conviction.

To Browning's temperament, also, may be ascribed another prominent
trait in his work. He steadily asserts the right of the individual to
live out his own life, to be himself in fulfilling his desires and
aspirations. _The Statue and the Bust_ is the famous exposition
of this doctrine. It is a teaching that neither the poet's optimism
nor his acumen has justified in the minds of men. It is a return to
the unbridled freedom of nature advocated by Whitman and Rousseau;
an extreme assertion of the value of the individual man, and of
unregulated democracy; an outgrowth, it may be, of the robustness and
originality of Browning's nature, and interesting--not as a clew to
his life, which conformed to that of organized society--but as a
clew to his independence of classical and conventional forms in the
exercise of his art.

Creative energy Browning has in high degree. With the poet's insight
into character and motives, the poet's grasp of the essential laws of
human life, the poet's vividness of imagination, he has portrayed a
host of types distinct from each other, true to life, strongly marked
and consistent. With fine dramatic instinct he has shown these
characters in true relation t