The poet's only hope of winning in his argument with the puritan lies in the possibility that the race of puritans is destined for extinction. Certainly they were much more numerous fifty years ago than now, and consequently more voluble in their denunciation of the poet. At that time they found their most redoubtable antagonists in the Brownings. Robert Browning devoted a poem, _With Francis Furini_, to exposing the incompatibility of asceticism and art, while Mrs. Browning, in _The Poet's Vow_, worked out the tragic consequences of the hero's mistaken determination to retire from the world, That so my purged, once human heart, From all the human rent, May gather strength to pledge and drink Your wine of wonderment, While you pardon me all blessingly The woe mine Adam sent. In the end Mrs. Browning makes her poet realize that he is crushing the best part of his nature by thus thwarting his human instincts. No, the poet's virtue must not be a pruning of his human nature, but a flowering of it. Nowhere are the Brownings more in sympathy than in their recognition of this fact. In _Pauline_, Browning traces the poet's mistaken effort to find goodness in self-restraint and denial. It is a failure, and the poem ends with the hero's recognition that "life is truth, and truth is good." The same idea is one of the leading motives in _Sordello_. One seems to be coming perilously near the decadent poet's argument again. And there remains to be dealt with a poet more extreme than Browning--Walt Whitman, who challenges us with his slogan, "Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul," [Footnote: _Song of Myself_.] and then records his zest in throwing himself into all phases of life. It is plain, at any rate, how the abandon of the decadent might develop from the poet's insistence upon his need to follow impulse utterly, to develop himself in all directions. The cry of Browning's poet in _Pauline_, I had resolved No age should come on me ere youth was spent, For I would wear myself out, Omar Khayyam's While you live Drink!--for once dead you never shall return, Swinburne's cry of despair, Thou has conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown gray with thy breath; We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death,[Footnote: _Hymn to Proserpine_.] show that in a revulsion from the asceticism of the puritan, no less than in a revulsion from the stupidity of the plain man, it may become easy for the poet to carry his _carpe diem_ philosophy very far. His talisman, pure love of beauty, must be indeed unerring if it is to guide aright his principle of restlessness That would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all [Footnote: _Pauline_.]