The poet, it appears, speaks here in his own person. Sauntering about Paris, he comes upon the Doric little Morgue, the dead-house, where they show their drowned. He enters, and sees through the screen of glass, the bodies of three men who committed suicide, the day before, by drowning themselves in the Seine. In the last stanza, he gives expression to his hopeful philosophy, which recognizes “some soul of goodness, in things evil”; * which sees in human nature, “potentiality of final deliverance from the evil in it, given only time enough for the work”. In this age of professed and often, no doubt, affected, agnosticism and pessimism, Browning is the foremost apostle of Hope. He, more than any other great author of the age, whether philosopher, or poet, or divine, has been inspired with the faith that “a sun will pierce The thickest cloud earth ever stretched; That, after Last, returns the First, Though a wide compass round be fetched; That what began best, can’t end worst, Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst.” -- * ‘Henry V.’, IV. 1. 4. -- Compare with this, the following stanzas from Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’, Section 54:-- “Oh yet we trust that somehow good Will be the final goal of ill, To pangs of nature, sins of will, Defects of doubt, and taints of blood. That nothing walks with aimless feet; That not one life shall be destroyed, Or cast as rubbish to the void, When God hath made the pile complete. * * * * * Behold, we know not anything; I can but trust that good shall fall At last--far off--at last, to all, And every winter change to spring.” Rabbi Ben Ezra. Accompany me, my young friend, in my survey of life from youth to old age. The present life does not rise to its best and then decline to its worst; “the best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made.” The indecisions, perplexities, and yearnings, the hopes and fears of youth, I do not remonstrate against. They are the conditions of vitality and growth, distinguish man’s life from the limited completeness of the “low kinds” of creation, “finished and finite clods untroubled by a spark”; and should be prized as inseparable from his high rank in existence. Life would have nothing to boast of, were man formed but to experience an unalloyed joy, to find always and never to seek. Care irks not the crop-full bird, and doubt frets not the maw-crammed beast. But man is disturbed by a divine spark which is his title to a nearer relationship with God who gives than with his creatures that receive.