Many a poem could I give to show you that Browning could pour out sweet music when he wrote of certain subjects. Here is one of his most charming songs—"Home Thoughts from Abroad":—
"Oh to be in England now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England sees, some morning unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England—now!
And after April, when May follows,
And the white-throat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray's edge,—
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you think he never could recapture
The first, fine, careless rapture!"
On the day of his death there was published the last volume of his poems, and it had been a great pleasure to him to hear with how much interest they were expected. For more than fifty years he had waited, and at last his message to his generation was being understood. He had been "ever a fighter," and now, as he stood facing that "one fight more, the best and the last," which was at hand, he had still one fine marching song to send back to his fellow-men.
"Never say of me that I am dead," he had asked of a friend not long before.
"No work begun shall ever pause for death!
Love will be helpful to me more and more
In the coming course, the new path I must tread."
So when those who loved him read the words that told how Robert Browning had died at Venice, having lived more than his threescore years and ten, they turned for their comfort to his last stirring message, and remembered him as he had wished to be remembered—
"At the midnight, in the silence of the sleep time,
When you set your fancies free,
Will they pass to where—by death, fools think, imprisoned—
Low he lies, who once so loved you, whom you loved so.
Pity me?
Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken!
What had I on earth to do
With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly?
Like the aimless, hopeless, did I drivel
Being who?
One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed though right were worsted wrong could triumph.
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake!
No, at noonday, in the bustle of men's work time,
Greet the unseen with a cheer.
Bid him forward, breast and back, as either should be.
'Strive and strive!' cry Speed—fight on, fare ever
There as here."
Three years after Browning's death a crowd of over eleven thousand persons filled Westminster to every corner, on the day when our other great poet, Alfred Tennyson, was borne here, to remain for ever "a citizen of the Abbey." His coffin, fitly draped with the Union Jack, because some of his finest lines had been called out by the thought of Empire, Flag, and Queen, was surrounded by all the most noteworthy men of the day as it was carried slowly through the aisles, "down the avenue of those men, princes and peers by right of intellect divine." Tennyson, like Browning, had written a last message to the world, but his was not a marching song. Instead it breathes of perfect peace, of the joy which came to him, "who throughout the night had trusted all to Him that held the helm, and then saw face to face, full flushed and glorious with the new morning's glow, the Pilot whom he had trusted."
"Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell
When I embark;
For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar."
These thoughts of his filled the Abbey with a sense of their restfulness; then there thundered out from thousands of voices the familiar hymn—