This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.
So, take and use Thy work:
Amend what flaws may lurk,
What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim!
My times be in Thy hand!
Perfect the cup as planned!
Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same!"
The emotion and the measure of Rabbi ben Ezra have the chastened, sweet gravity of wise old age. Prospice has all the impetuous blood and fierce lyric fire of militant manhood. It is a cry of passionate exultation and exaltation in the very face of death: a war-cry of triumph over the last of foes. I would like to connect it with the quotation from Dante which Browning, in a published letter, tells us that he wrote in his wife's Testament after her death: "Thus I believe, thus I affirm, thus I am certain it is, that from this life I shall pass to another better, there, where that lady lives, of whom my soul was enamoured." If Rabbi ben Ezra has been excelled as a Song of Life, then Prospice may have been excelled as a Hymn of Death.
"PROSPICE.