So writes Mrs. Browning. And thus writes Barry Cornwall, on the same trite text; it is the last stanza of the History of a Life, and of a successful one:—
“And then—he died. Behold before ye
Humanity’s poor sum and story;
Life—death—and all that is of glory.”
And again, in the same poet’s chanson of the time of Charlemagne, the stanza that magnifies that hero-king, and tells how he fought and vanquished Lombard, Saxon, Saracen, and ruled every race he conquered with a deep consummate skill—is followed by one beginning,
“But—he died! and he was buried
In his tomb of sculptured stone,” etc.
And once again, in one of this author’s dramatic fragments is sketched the career of what Mr. Carlyle would call a “foiled potentiality”—of one who, in favourable circumstances, might have been, but who in prosaic reality and the matter-of-fact pressure of this work-a-day world, never actually became, great. Had he but lived under better auspices, he would have been—
B. “A king?