God, can solve that question for himself, and not for another.  That is Browning’s position when he writes as a poet, and no one has written more positively on the subject.  But when he submits the question to reasoning, he wavers, as he does here, and leaves the question more undecided than anywhere else in his work.  This is a pity, but it is the natural penalty of his partial abandonment of the poetic for the prosaic realm, of the imagination for the understanding, of the Reason for reasoning.

FOOTNOTES: 

[11] Rene Gentilhomme, page to Prince Conde, heir of France since Louis XIII. and his brother Gaston were childless, is surprised, while writing a love poem, by a lightning flash which shatters a marble ducal crown.  He thinks this a revelation from God, and he prophecies that a Dauphin will be born to the childless Queen.  The Dauphin was born, and Rene pushed suddenly into fame.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XVIII

THE LAST POEMS

Two Volumes of Dramatic Idyls, one in 1879, the other in 1880, followed La Saisiaz and The Two Poets of Croisic.  These are also mixed books, composed, partly of studies of character written in rhythmical prose, and partly of poems wrought out of the pure imagination.  Three of them—­if they were written at this time—­show how the Greek legends still dwelt with Browning; and they brought with them the ocean-scent, heroic life, and mythical charm of Athenian thought.  It would be difficult, if one could write of them at all, not to write of them poetically; and Pheidippides, Echetlos, Pan and Luna are alive with force, imaginative joy, and the victorious sense the poet has of having conquered his material. Pheidippides is as full of fire, of careless heroism as Herve Riel, and told in as ringing verse.  The versing of Echetlos, its rugged, rousing sound, its movement, are in most excellent harmony with the image of the rude, giant “Holder of the ploughshare,” who at Marathon drove his furrows through the Persians and rooted up the Mede.  Browning has gathered into one picture and one sound the whole spirit of the story. Pan and Luna is a bold re-rendering of the myth that Vergil enshrines, and the greater part of it is of such poetic freshness that I think it must be a waif from the earlier years of his poetry.  Nor is there better imaginative work in his descriptive poetry than the image of the naked moon, in virginal distress, flying for refuge through the gazing heaven to the succourable cloud—­fleece on fleece of piled-up snow, drowsily patient—­where Pan lay in ambush for her beauty.