There is, however, among these fifty men and women one true and sublime poet,—­the dying “Grammarian,” who applies the alchemy of a lofty imagination to the dry business of verbal erudition.

     “He said, ’What’s time?  Leave Now for dogs and apes! 
       Man has Forever.’”

This is one of the half-dozen lyrics which enshrine in noble and absolutely individual form the central core of Browning’s passion and thought.  Even the verse, with its sequence of smooth-flowing iambics broken by the leap of the dactyl, and the difficult double rhyme, sustains the mood of victorious but not lightly won serenity of soul—­“too full for sound and foam.”  It is, among songs over the dead, what Rabbi ben Ezra and Prospice are among the songs which face and grapple with death; the fittest requiem to follow such deaths as those.  Like Ben Ezra, the Grammarian “trusts death,” and stakes his life on the trust:—­

     “He ventured neck or nothing—­heaven’s success
        Found, or earth’s failure: 
      ‘Wilt thou trust death or not?’ He answered, ’Yes: 
        Hence with life’s pale lure!’”

To ordinary eyes he spends his days grovelling among the dust and dregs of erudition; but it is the grovelling of a builder at work upon a fabric so colossally planned that life is fitly spent in laying the foundations.  He was made in the large mould of the gods,—­born with “thy face and throat, Lyric Apollo,”—­and the disease which crippled and silenced him in middle life could only alter the tasks on which he wreaked his mind.  And now that he is dead, he passes, as by right, to the fellowship of the universe—­of the sublime things of nature.

     “Here—­here’s his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,
        Lightnings are loosened,
      Stars come and go!  Let joy break with the storm,
        Peace let the dew send! 
      Lofty designs must close in like effects: 
        Loftily lying,
      Leave him—­still loftier than the world suspects,
        Living and dying.”

VI.

The Grammarian’s Funeral achieves, in the terms and with the resources of Browning’s art, the problem of which he saw the consummate master in Shelley,—­that of throwing “films” for the connexion of Power and Love in the abstract with Beauty and Good in the concrete, and finding a link between the lowliest service or worship and the spirit of God.  Such a conception of a poet’s crowning glory implied a peculiarly close relation in Browning’s view between poetry and religion, and in particular with the religion which, above all others, glorified the lowly.  Here lay, in short, the supreme worth for him of the Christian idea.  “The revelation of God in Christ” was for him the consummate example of that union of divine love with the world—­“through all the web of Being blindly wove”—­which Shelley had contemplated in the radiant glow of his poetry;