and the faint circlet prophesies the orb,
he sees so much as, just evolving these, the stateliness, the wisdom,
and the strength to due completion, will suffice this life,
and lead him at his grandest to the grave."

Browning fully recognizes, to use an expression in his
`Fra Lippo Lippi', fully recognizes "the value and significance
of flesh." A healthy and well-toned spiritual life is with him
the furthest removed from asceticism. To the passage from
his `Rabbi Ben Ezra' already quoted, "all good things are ours,
nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul",
should be added what David sings to Saul, in the poem entitled `Saul'.
Was the full physical life ever more beautifully sung?

"Oh! our manhood's prime vigour! no spirit feels waste,
Not a muscle is stopped in its playing, nor sinew unbraced.
Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock,
The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool silver shock
Of the plunge in a pool's living water, the hunt of the bear,
And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair.
And the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with gold dust divine,
And the locust-flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full draught of wine,
And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell
That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well.
How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy!"

Though this is said in the person of the beautiful shepherd-boy,
David, whoever has lived any time with Browning, through his poetry,
must be assured that it is also an expression of the poet's
own experience of the glory of flesh. He has himself been
an expression of the fullest physical life: and now,
in his five and seventieth year, since the 7th of last May,
he preserves both mind and body in a magnificent vigor.
If his soul had been lodged in a sickly, rickety body,
he could hardly have written these lines from `Saul'. Nor could he
have written `Caliban upon Setebos', especially the opening lines:
"Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best, flat on his belly
in the pit's much mire, with elbows wide, fists clenched
to prop his chin. And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush,
and feels about his spine small eft-things course, run in and out
each arm, and make him laugh: and while above his head
a pompion-plant, coating the cave-top as a b