and
thought. Even the verse, with its sequence of smooth-flowing iambics
broken by the leap of the dactyl, and the difficult double rhyme,
sustains the mood of victorious but not lightly won serenity of
soul--"too full for sound and foam." It is, among songs over the dead,
what _Rabbi ben Ezra_ and _Prospice_ are among the songs which face and
grapple with death; the fittest requiem to follow such deaths as those.
Like Ben Ezra, the Grammarian "trusts death," and stakes his life on the
trust:--

"He ventured neck or nothing--heaven's success
Found, or earth's failure:
'Wilt thou trust death or not?' He answered, 'Yes:
Hence with life's pale lure!'"

To ordinary eyes he spends his days grovelling among the dust and dregs
of erudition; but it is the grovelling of a builder at work upon a
fabric so colossally planned that life is fitly spent in laying the
foundations. He was made in the large mould of the gods,--born with "thy
face and throat, Lyric Apollo,"--and the disease which crippled and
silenced him in middle life could only alter the tasks on which he
wreaked his mind. And now that he is dead, he passes, as by right, to
the fellowship of the universe--of the sublime things of nature.

"Here--here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,
Lightnings are loosened,
Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm,
Peace let the dew send!
Lofty designs must close in like effects:
Loftily lying,
Leave him--still loftier than the world suspects,
Living and dying."

VI.

_The Grammarian's Funeral_ achieves, in the terms and with the resources
of Browning's art, the problem of which he saw the consummate master in
Shelley,--that of throwing "films" for the connexion of Power and Love
in the abstract with Beauty and Good in the concrete, and finding a link
between the lowliest service or worship and the spirit of God. Such a
conception of a poet's crowning glory implied a peculiarly close
relation in Browning's view between poetry and religion, and in
particular with the religion which, above all others, glorified the
lowly. Here lay, in short, the supreme worth for him of the Christian
idea. "The revelation of God in Christ" was for him the consummate
example of that union of divine love with the world--"through all the
web of Being blindly wove"--which Shelley had contemplated in the
radiant glow of his poetry; accepted by