hose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that he heard it once; we shall hear it by-and-by.

And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence
For the fulness of the days? Have we withered or agonized?
Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence?
Why rushed the discord in, but that harmony should be prized?
Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear,
Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe:
But God has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear;
The rest may reason and welcome: 'tis we musicians know."

In _Rabbi ben Ezra_ Browning has crystallized his religious philosophy
into a shape of abiding beauty. It has been called, not rashly, the
noblest of modern religious poems. Alike in substance and in form it
belongs to the highest order of meditative poetry; and it has, in
Browning's work, an almost unique quality of grave beauty, of severe
restraint, of earnest and measured enthusiasm. What the _Psalm of Life_
is to the people who do not think, _Rabbi ben Ezra_ might and should be
to those who do: a light through the darkness, a lantern of guidance and
a beacon of hope, to the wanderers lost and weary in the _selva
selvaggia_. It is one of those poems that mould character. I can give
only one or two of its most characteristic verses.

"Not on the vulgar mass
Called 'work' must sentence pass,
Things done, that took the eye and had the price;
O'er which, from level stand,
The low world laid its hand,
Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice:

But all, the world's coarse thumb
And finger failed to plumb,
So passed in making up the main account;
All instincts immature,
All purposes unsure,
That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount:

Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped;
All I could never be,
All, men ignored in me.
This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.

* * * * *

So