fitful flashes could no longer transfigure the world for
him, but only cast a fantastic flicker at moments across its prosaic
features. The opening lines sadly confess the wane of the old vision:--

"And now a flower is just a flower:
Man, bird, beast are but beast, bird, man--
Simply themselves, uncinct by dower
Of dyes which, when life's day began,
Round each in glory ran."

The famous Epilogue is the last cheer of an old warrior in whom the
stout fibre of heroism still held out when the finer nerve of vision
decayed; but _A Reverie_ shows how heavy a strain it had to endure in
sustaining his faith that the world is governed by Love. Of outward
evidence for that conviction Browning saw less and less. But age had
not dimmed his inner witness, and those subtle filaments of mysterious
affinity which, for Browning, bound the love of God for man to the love
of man for woman, remained unimpaired. The old man of seventy-seven was
still, in his last autumn, singing songs redolent, not of autumn, but of
the perfume and the ecstasy of spring and youth,--love-lyrics so
illusively youthful that one, not the least competent, of his critics
has refused to accept them as work of his old age. Yet _Now_ and _Summum
Bonum_, and _A Pearl, a Girl_, with all their apparent freshness and
spontaneity, are less like rapt utterances of passion than eloquent
analyses of it by one who has known it and who still vibrates with the
memory. What preoccupies and absorbs him is not the woman, but the
wonder of the transfiguration wrought for him by her word or kiss,--the
moment made eternal, the "blaze" in which he became "lord of heaven and
earth." But some of the greatest love-poetry of the world--from Dante
onwards--has reflected an intellect similarly absorbed in articulating a
marvellous experience. For the rest, _Asolando_ is a miscellany of old
and new,--bright loose drift from the chance moods of genius, or bits of
anecdotic lumber carefully recovered and refurbished, as in prescience
of the nearing end.

Yet no such prescience appears to have been his. His buoyant confidence
in his own vitality held its own. He was full of schemes of work. At the
end of October the idyllic days at Asolo ended, and Browning repaired
for the last time to the Palazzo Rezzonico. A month later he caught a
bronchial catarrh; failure of the heart set in, and on the evening of
December 12 he peacefully died. On the last day of the