The end of the second asks what is the true test of the greater poet, when people take on them to weigh the worth of poets--who was better, best, this, that or the other bard? When I read this I trembled, knowing that I had compared him with Tennyson. But when I heard the answer I trembled no more. "The best poet of any two is the one who leads the happier life. The strong and joyful poet is the greater." But this is a test of the greatness of a man, not necessarily of a poet. And, moreover, in this case, Tennyson and Browning both lived equally happy lives. Both were strong to the end, and imaginative joy was their companion. But the verse in which Browning winds up his answer is one of the finest in his poetry. So, force is sorrow, and each sorrow, force; What then? since Swiftness gives the charioteer The palm, his hope be in the vivid horse Whose neck God clothed with thunder, not the steer Sluggish and safe! Yoke Hatred, Crime, Remorse, Despair; but ever mid the whirling fear, Let, through the tumult, break the poet's face Radiant, assured his wild slaves win the race! _La Saisiaz_ is a more important poem: it describes the sudden death of his friend, Ann Egerton Smith, and passes from that, and all he felt concerning it, into an argument on the future life of the soul, with the assumption that God is, and the soul. The argument is interesting, but does not concern us here. What does concern us is that Browning has largely recovered his poetical way of treating a subject. He is no longer outside of it, but in it. He does not use it as a means of exercising his brains only. It is steeped in true and vital feeling, and the deep friendship he had for his friend fills even the theological argument with a passionate intensity. Nevertheless, the argument is perilously near the work of the understanding alone--as if a question like that of immortality could receive any solution from the hands of the understanding. Only each man, in the recesses of his own spirit with God, can solve that question for himself, and not for another. That is Browning's position when he writes as a poet, and no one has written more positively on the subject. But when he submits the question to reasoning, he wavers, as he does here, and leaves the question more undecided than anywhere else in his work. This is a pity, but it is the natural penalty of his partial abandonment of the poetic for the prosaic realm, of the imagination for the understanding, of the Reason for reasoning. FOOTNOTES: [11] René Gentilhomme, page to Prince Condé, heir of France since Louis XIII. and his brother Gaston were childless, is surprised, while writing a love poem, by a lightning flash which shatters a marble ducal crown. He thinks this a revelation from God, and he prophecies that a Dauphin will be born to the childless Queen. The Dauphin was born, and René pushed suddenly into fame. * * * * *