"God's in His heaven,
All's right with the world!"
Mr. W. W. Story writes to me that he spent three days with the poet at this time, and that the latter seemed, except for a slight asthma, to be as vigorous in mind and body as ever. Thence, later in the autumn, he went to Venice, to join his son and daughter-in-law at the home where he was "to have a corner for his old age," the beautiful Palazzo Rezzonico, on the Grand Canal. He was never happier, more sanguine, more joyous, than here. He worked for three or four hours each morning, walked daily for about two hours, crossed occasionally to the Lido with his sister, and in the evenings visited friends or went to the opera. But for some time past, his heart — always phenomenally slow in its action, and of late ominously intermittent — had been noticeably weaker. As he suffered no pain and little inconvenience, he paid no particular attention to the matter. Browning had as little fear of death as doubt in God. In a controlling Providence he did indeed profoundly believe. He felt, with Joubert, that "it is not difficult to believe in God, if one does not worry oneself to define Him."*
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* "Browning's `orthodoxy' brought him into many a combat
with his rationalistic friends, some of whom could hardly believe
that he took his doctrine seriously. Such was the fact, however;
indeed, I have heard that he once stopped near an open-air assembly
which an atheist was haranguing, and, in the freedom of his `incognito',
gave strenuous battle to the opinions uttered. To one who had spoken
of an expected `Judgment Day' as a superstition, I heard him say:
`I don't see that. Why should there not be a settling day in the universe,
as when a master settles with his workmen at the end of the week?'
There was something in his tone and manner which suggested his
dramatic conception of religious ideas and ideals." — Moncure D. Conway.
—
"How should externals satisfy my soul?" was his cry in "Sordello", and it was the fundamental strain of all his poetry, as the fundamental motive is expressible in
"— a loving worm within its sod
Were diviner than a loveless god
Amid his worlds" —
love being with him the golden key wherewith to unlock the world of the universe, of the soul, of all nature. He is as convinced of the two absolute facts of God and Soul as Cardinal Newman in writing of "Two and two only, supreme and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator." Most fervently he believes that
"Haply for us the ideal dawn shall break . . .
And set our pulse in tune with moods divine" —
though, co-equally, in the necessity of "making man sole sponsor of himself." Ever and again, of course, he was betrayed by the bewildering and defiant puzzle of life: seeing in the face of the child the seed of sorrow, "in the green tree an ambushed flame, in Phosphor a vaunt-guard of Night." Yet never of him could be written that thrilling saying which Sainte-Beuve uttered of Pascal, "That lost traveller who yearns for home, who, strayed without a guide in a dark forest, takes many times the wrong road, goes, returns upon his steps, is discouraged, sits down at a crossing of the roads, utters cries to which no one responds, resumes his march with frenzy and pain, throws himself upon the ground and wants to die, and reaches home at last only after all sorts of anxieties and after sweating blood." No darkness, no tempest, no gloom, long confused his vision of `the ideal dawn'. As the carrier-dove is often baffled, yet ere long surely finds her way through smoke and fog and din to her far country home, so he too, however distraught, soon or late soared to untroubled ether. He had that profound inquietude, which the great French critic says `attests a moral nature of a high rank, and a mental nature stamped with the seal of the archangel.' But, unlike Pascal — who in Sainte-Beuve's words exposes in the human mind itself two abysses, "on one side an elevation toward God, toward the morally beautiful, a return movement toward an illustrious origin, and on the other side an abasement in the direction of evil" — Browning sees, believes in, holds to nothing short of the return movement, for one and all, toward an illustrious origin.
The crowning happiness of a happy life was his death in the city he loved so well, in the arms of his dear ones, in the light of a world-wide fame. The silence to which the most eloquent of us must all one day lapse came upon him like the sudden seductive twilight of the Tropics, and just when he had bequeathed to us one of his finest utterances.
It seems but a day or two ago that the present writer heard from the lips of the dead poet a mockery of death's vanity — a brave assertion of the glory of life. "Death, death! It is this harping on death I despise so much," he remarked with emphasis of gesture as well as of speech — the inclined head and body, the right hand lightly placed upon the listener's knee, the abrupt change in the inflection of the voice, all so characteristic of him — "this idle and often cowardly as well as ignorant harping! Why should we not change like everything else? In fiction, in poetry, in so much of both, French as well as English, and, I am told, in American art and literature, the shadow of death — call it what you will, despair, negation, indifference — is upon us. But what fools who talk thus! Why, `amico mio', you know as well as I that death is life, just as our daily, our momentarily dying body is none the less alive and ever recruiting new forces of existence. Without death, which is our crapelike churchyardy word for change, for growth, there could be no prolongation of that which we call life. Pshaw! it is foolish to argue upon such a thing even. For myself, I deny death as an end of everything. Never say of me that I am dead!"