tion to be overwhelming in view of
possibilities of humanity, is the completest gratification of desires
unworthily limited:--

"`Thou art shut
Out of the heaven of spirit; glut
Thy sense upon the world: 'tis thine
For ever--take it!' (`Easter Day', xx.).

On the other hand, the soul which has found in success not rest
but a starting-point, which refuses to see in the first-fruits
of a partial victory the fulness of its rightful triumph,
has ever before it a sustaining and elevating vision:--

"`What stops my despair?
This:--'tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man
Would do!' (`Saul', 18).

"`What I aspired to be,
And was not, comforts me;
A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale.'"
(`Rabbi Ben Ezra', 7).--Rev. Prof. Westcott on Browning's
View of Life (`Browning Soc. Papers', iv., 405, 406).

12.

Well, it is earth with me; silence resumes her reign:
I will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce.
Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again,
Sliding by semitones, till I sink to the minor,--yes,
And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground,
Surveying a while the heights I rolled from into the deep;
Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found,
The C Major of this life: so, now I will try to sleep.

"Touch him ne'er so lightly."

{Epilogue to Dramatic Idyls. Second Series.}

--
* See `Pages from an Album', in `The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine'
(Scribner's), for November 1882, pp. 159, 160, where is given
a fac-simile of the poet's Ms. of these verses and of the ten verses
he afterwards added, in response, it seems, to a carping critic.
--

"Touch him ne'er so lightly, into song he broke:
Soil so quick-receptive,--not one feather-seed,
Not one flower dust fell but straight its fall awoke
Vitalizing virtue: song would song succeed
Sudden as spontaneous--prove a poet-soul!"
Indeed?
Rock's the song-soil rather, surface hard and bare:
Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage
Vainly both expend,--few flowers awaken there:
Quiet in its cleft broods--what the after age
Knows and names a pine, a nation's heritage.

Memorabilia.