f art. It is not to be pretended that, even from this
point of view, they were always successful, only that they are organic.
The nineteenth century would have to be lived over again to wipe these
passages out of Browning's poetry.

In that century he stands as one of the great men of England. His
doctrines are the mere effulgence of his personality. He himself was the
truth which he taught. His life was the life of one of his own heroes;
and in the close of his life--by a coincidence which is not sad, but
full of meaning--may be seen one of those apparent paradoxes in which he
himself delighted.

Through youth and manhood Browning rose like a planet calmly following
the laws of his own being. From time to time he put forth his volumes
which the world did not understand. Neglect caused him to suffer, but
not to change. It was not until his work was all but finished, not till
after the publication of The Ring and the Book, that complete
recognition came to him. It was given him by men and women who had been
in the nursery when he began writing, who had passed their youth with
his minor poems, and who understood him.

In later life Browning's powers declined. The torrent of feeling could
no longer float the raft of doctrine, as it had done so lightly and for
so long. His poems, always difficult, grew dry as well.

But Browning was true to himself. He had all his life loved converse
with men and women, and still enjoyed it. He wrote constantly and to his
uttermost. It was not for him to know that his work was done. He wrote
on manfully to the end, showing, occasionally, his old power, and always
his old spirit. And on his death-bed it was not only his doctrine, but
his life that blazed out in the words:--

"One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph.
Held, we fall to rise--are baffled to fight better--
Sleep to wake."

* * * * *

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

In the early eighties, and in an epoch when the ideals of George Eliot
were still controlling, the figure of Stevenson rose with a sort of
radiance as a writer whose sole object was to entertain. Most of the
great novelists were then dead, and the scientific school was in the
ascendant. Fiction was entering upon its death grapple with sociology.
Stevenson came, with his t