Easeful death--it is a good word. Keats knew disease, and was content with prospect of ease; though at the end there is a note of depression or despair at the thought of becoming a "sod," deaf and blind to beauty. This reminds us of the attitude of other poets towards the great problem. Tennyson is mildly optimistic and placid; stretches, indeed, somewhat lame hands of faith in his sorrowful moments when his friend has died, but on the whole is healthily disposed; friendly to the most cheerful way of looking at it; inclined, with true British burliness, to make the best of a bad job--a job which, after all, may not be so very bad when we come to closer quarters with it. Afar, death is the spectre feared of man; seen nearer, he may metamorphose into a beautiful Iris, sent by heavenly mercy. And, afterwards, the new spiritual state will probably be an improvement--Aeonian evolution through all the spheres. Therefore, away with all selfish mourning either about our own prospective fate or that of those who have left us. Let us hate the black negation of the bier: "And wish the dead, as happier than ourselves And higher, having climb'd one step beyond Our village miseries, might be borne in white To burial or to burning, hymned from hence With songs in praise of death, and crowned with flowers." No doubt Tennyson was to a very great extent able to stay himself on the personal mystic experiences described in his poem _The Ancient Sage_--experiences which gave him a subjective assurance that death was "a ludicrous impossibility". Browning, characteristically buoyant, was ready to face death with a laugh; the fog in the throat will pass, the black minute's at end, then thy breast. In _Prospice_ we feel the eager sureness with which he looked forward to rejoining her whose bodily presence had left him a few months before. But even Browning's cheery salutation is outdone by Whitman. The American, though acquainted with suffering as Browning was not, and though apparently without much belief or interest in personal survival, was almost uncannily friendly to his own taking off. And it was not because he suffered so greatly that he hailed release. It was more the natural outcome of his joyous temperament, subdued at the last to a kind of solemn exaltation. The following stanzas were written with George Inness' picture _The Valley of the Shadow of Death_ in mind: