is deadlier still,
In this, that every day my sense of joy
Grows more acute, my soul (intensified
By power and insight) more enlarged, more keen;
While every day my hairs fall more and more,
My hand shakes, and the heavy years increase--
The horror quickening still from year to year,
The consummation coming past escape
When I shall know most, and yet least enjoy--
When all my works wherein I prove my worth,
Being present still to mock me in men's mouths,
Alive still, in the praise of such as thou,
I, I the feeling, thinking, acting man,
The man who loved his life so overmuch,
Sleep in my urn. It is so horrible
I dare at times imagine to my need
Some future state revealed to us by Zeus,
Unlimited in capability
For joy, as this is in desire of joy,
--To seek which the joy-hunger forces us:
That, stung by straitness of our life, made strait
On purpose to make prized the life at large--
Freed by the throbbing impulse we call death,
We burst there as the worm into the fly.
Who, while a worm still, wants his wings. But no!
Zeus has not yet revealed it; and alas,
He must have done so, were it possible!

This is one only of Browning's statements of what he held to be the
fierce necessity for another life. Without it, nothing is left for
humanity, having arrived at full culture, knowledge, at educated love of
beauty, at finished morality and unselfishness--nothing in the end but
Cleon's cry--sorrowful, somewhat stern, yet gentle--to Protus,

Live long and happy, and in that thought die,
Glad for what was. Farewell.

But for those who are not Cleon and Protus, not kings in comfort or
poets in luxury, who have had no gladness, what end--what is to be said
of them? I will not stay to speak of _A Death in the Desert_, which is
another of these poems, because the most part of it is concerned with
questions of modern theology. St. John awakes into clear consciousness
just before his death in the cave where he lies tended by a few
disciples. He foresees some of the doubts of this century and meets them
as he can. The bulk of this poem, very interesting in its way, is
Browning's exposition of his own belief, not an imaginative
representation of what St. John actually would have said. It does not
therefore come into my subject. What does come into it is the
extraordinary naturalness and vitality of the description g