In these poems, as in other phases of his work, Browning runs the gamut of life, of art, and of thought. He has set a new standard in regard to the handling of classic material, one which should open the field of classic lore afresh to future poets. Instead of trying to ape in more or less ineffectual imitations the style and thought of the great masters of antiquity, or simply use their mythology as a well-spring of romance to be clothed in whatever vagaries of style the individual poet might be able to invent, the aim of the future poet should be to reconstruct the life and thought of that wonderful civilization. One playwright, at least, has made a step in the right direction. I refer to Gilbert Murray, whose classical scholarship has thrown so much light upon the vexed questions of Browning's attitude toward Euripides, and who, in his "Andromache," has written a play, not in classical, but in modern form, which seems to bring us more into touch with the life of Homer's day than even Homer himself. VII PROPHETIC VISIONS The division between centuries, though it be an arbitrary one, does actually appear to mark fairly definite steps in human development, and already there are indications that the twentieth century is taking on a character quite distinct from that of the nineteenth. It looks now as if it were to be the century of the realization of mankind's wildest dreams in the past. Air navigation, the elixir of life, perpetual motion, are some of them. About the first no one can now have much skepticism, for if airships are not as yet common objects of the everyday sky, they, at least, occupy a large share of attention in the magazines, while the aviator, a being who did not exist in the last century, is now the hero of the hour.