sentence:—­’Le silence eternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.’  It is overwhelming, obviously and immediately; it, so to speak, knocks one down.  Browne’s ultimate object was to create some such tremendous effect as that, by no knock-down blow, but by a multitude of delicate, subtle, and suggestive touches, by an elaborate evocation of memories and half-hidden things, by a mysterious combination of pompous images and odd unexpected trifles drawn together from the ends of the earth and the four quarters of heaven.  His success gives him a place beside Webster and Blake, on one of the very highest peaks of Parnassus.  And, if not the highest of all, Browne’s peak is—­or so at least it seems from the plains below—­more difficult of access than some which are no less exalted.  The road skirts the precipice the whole way.  If one fails in the style of Pascal, one is merely flat; if one fails in the style of Browne, one is ridiculous.  He who plays with the void, who dallies with eternity, who leaps from star to star, is in danger at every moment of being swept into utter limbo, and tossed forever in the Paradise of Fools.

Browne produced his greatest work late in life; for there is nothing in the Religio Medici which reaches the same level of excellence as the last paragraphs of The Garden of Cyrus and the last chapter of Urn Burial.  A long and calm experience of life seems, indeed, to be the background from which his most amazing sentences start out into being.  His strangest phantasies are rich with the spoils of the real world.  His art matured with himself; and who but the most expert of artists could have produced this perfect sentence in The Garden of Cyrus, so well known, and yet so impossible not to quote?

Nor will the sweetest delight of gardens afford much comfort in sleep; wherein the dullness of that sense shakes hands with delectable odours; and though in the bed of Cleopatra, can hardly with any delight raise up the ghost of a rose.

This is Browne in his most exquisite mood.  For his most characteristic, one must go to the concluding pages of Urn Burial, where, from the astonishing sentence beginning—­’Meanwhile Epicurus lies deep in Dante’s hell’—­to the end of the book, the very quintessence of his work is to be found.  The subject—­mortality in its most generalised aspect—­has brought out Browne’s highest powers; and all the resources of his art—­elaboration of rhythm, brilliance of phrase, wealth and variety of suggestion, pomp and splendour of imagination—­are accumulated in every paragraph.  To crown all, he has scattered through these few pages a multitude of proper names, most of them gorgeous in sound, and each of them carrying its own strange freight of reminiscences and allusions from the unknown depths of the past.  As one reads, an extraordinary procession of persons seems to pass before one’s eyes—­Moses, Archimedes, Achilles, Job, Hector and Charles the Fifth, Cardan