contrast with the ardent ideality of _Rabbi Ben Ezra_ may be set the uncompromising realism of _Apparent Failure_, with its poetry of the Paris morgue. The lover of life will scrutinise death at its ugliest and worst, blinking no hideous fact. Yet, even so, the reverence for humanity-- Poor men, God made, and all for that!-- is not quenched, nor is the hope quenched that After Last returns the First, Though a wide compass round be fetched, That what began best, can't end worst. The optimism is unreasoned, and rightly so, for the spirit of the poem, with its suggestive title, is not argumentative. The sense of "the pity of it" in one heart, remorse which has somehow come into existence out of the obscure storehouse of nature, or out of God, is the only justification suggested for a hope that nature or God must at the last intend good and not evil to the poor defeated abjects, who most abhorred their lives in Paris yesterday. And the word "Nature" here would be rejected by Browning as less than the truth. In 1864 under somewhat altered conditions, and from a ground somewhat shifted, Browning in _A Death in the Desert_ and the _Epilogue_ to "Dramatis Personae" continued his apology for the Christian faith. The apologetics are, however, in the first instance poems, and they remain poems at the last. The imaginary scene of the death of the Evangelist John is rendered with the finest art; its dignity is that of a certain noble bareness; in the dim-lighted grotto are the aged disciple and the little group of witnesses to whom he utters his legacy of words; at the cave's edge is the Bactrian crying from time to time his bird-like cry of assurance: Outside was all noon and the burning blue. The slow return of the dying man to consciousness of his surroundings is as true as if it were studied from a death-bed; his sudden awakening at the words "I am the Resurrection and the Life" arrives not as a dramatic surprise but as the simplest surprise of nature--light breaking forth before sunset. The chief speaker of the poem is chosen because the argument is one concerning faith that comes through love, and St John was the disciple who had learnt love's deepest secrets. The dialectic proceeds along large lines, which have only the subtlety of simplicity. The verse moves gravely, tenderly, often weighted with monosyllables; a pondering, dwelling verse; and great single lines arise so naturally that while they fill the mind with a peculiar power, they are felt to be of one texture with the whole: this, for example,-- We would not lose The last of what might happen on his face; and this:-- When there was mid sea and the mighty things; and this:-- Lie bare to the universal prick of light; and these:-- The Bactrian was but a wild childish man, And could not write nor speak, but only loved. Such lines, however, are made to be read _in situ_.