wrought by his elder years, quitting the leaves and branches and drawing down to the root.  But when in prologue or epilogue to this volume or that Browning touches upon the great happiness, the great sorrow of his own life, he is always young.  Here the lyrical epilogue is inspired by a noble enthusiasm, and closes with a surprise of beauty.  What if all his happy faith in the purpose of life, and the Divine presence through all its course, were but a reflex from the private and personal love that had once been his and was still above and around him?  Such a doubt contained its own refutation: 

    Only, at heart’s utmost joy and triumph, terror
      Sudden turns the blood to ice:  a chill wind disencharms
    All the late enchantment!  What if all be error—­
      If the halo irised round my head were, Love, thine arms?

All the more, if this were so, must the speaker’s heart turn Godwards in gratitude.  The whole design of the volume with its theological parables and its beautiful lyrics of human love implies that there is a correspondency between the truths of religion and the truths of the passion of love between man and woman.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 141:  Mr Gosse:  “Dictionary of National Biography,” Supplement, i. 317.]

[Footnote 142:  Of the mother in this poem, a writer in the “Browning Society’s Papers,” Miss E.D.  West, said justly:  “There is discernible in her no soul which could be cleansed from guilt by any purgatorial process....  Her fault had not been moral, had not been sin, to be punished by pain inflicted on the soul; it was merely the uncounteracted primary instinct of self-preservation, and as such it is fitliest dealt with by the simple depriving her, without further penalty, of the very life which she had secured for herself at so horrible a cost.”]

[Footnote 143:  The story of the melon-seller was related by a correspondent of The Times in 1846, and is told by Browning in a letter to Miss Barrett of Aug. 6 of that year.  Thus subjects of verse rose up in his memory after many years.]

Chapter XVII

Closing Works and Days

Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day, published in 1887, Browning’s last volume but one, betrays not the slightest decline in his mental vigour.  It suffers, however, from the fact that several of the “Parleyings” are discussions—­emotional, it is true, as well as intellectual—­of somewhat abstract themes, that these discussions are often prolonged beyond what the subject requires, and that the “People of Importance” are in some instances not men and women, but mere sounding-boards to throw out Browning’s own voice.  When certain aspects or principles of art are considered in Fra Lippo Lippi, before us stands Brother Lippo himself, a living, breathing