had Milton, had Wordsworth, a larger and
more admiring audience in his own day? If the audience of Milton and of
Wordsworth has widened, it would be the merest paradox to speak of
either Milton or Wordsworth as a popular poet. By this time, every one
at least knows them by name, though it would be a little unkind to
consider too curiously how large a proportion of the people who know
them by name have read many consecutive lines of _Paradise Lost_ or _The
Excursion_. But to be so generally known by name is something, and it
has not yet fallen to the lot of Browning. "Browning is dead," said a
friend of mine, a hunting man, to another hunting man, a friend of his.
"Dear me, is he?" said the other doubtfully; "did he 'come out' your
way?" By the time Browning has been dead as long as Wordsworth, I do not
think anyone will be found to make these remarks. Death, not only from
the Christian standpoint, is the necessary pathway to immortality. As it
is, Browning's fame has been steadily increasing, at first slowly
enough, latterly with even a certain rapidity. From the first he has had
the exceptional admiration of those whose admiration is alone really
significant, whose applause can alone be really grateful to a
self-respecting writer. No poet of our day, no poet, perhaps, of any
day, has been more secure in the admiring fellowship of his comrades in
letters. And of all the poets of our day, it is he whose influence seems
to be most vital at the moment, most pregnant for the future. For the
time, he has also an actual sort of church of his own. The churches
pass, with the passing away of the worshippers; but the spirit remains,
and must remain if it has once been so vivid to men, if it has once been
a refuge, a promise of strength, a gift of consolation. And there has
been all this, over and above its supreme poetic quality, in the vast
and various work, Shakesperean in breadth, Shakesperean in penetration,
of the poet whose last words, the appropriate epilogue of a lifetime,
were these:

"At the midnight, in the silence of the sleep-time,
When you set your fancies free,
Will they pass to where--by death, fools think, imprisoned--
Low he lies who once so loved you, whom you loved so,
--Pity me?

Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken!
What had I on earth to do
With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly?
Like the aimless, helpless, hope