[The Poetry Of Robert Browning by Stopford A. Brooke]@TWC D-Link book
The Poetry Of Robert Browning

CHAPTER XVIII
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No laziness, no feebleness in effort, injured his work, no desire for money, no faltering of aspiration, no pandering of his gift and genius to please the world, no surrender of art for the sake of fame or filthy lucre, no falseness to his ideal, no base pessimism, no slavery to science yet no boastful ignorance of its good, no morbid naturalism, no devotion to the false forms of beauty, no despair of man, no retreat from men into a world of sickly or vain beauty, no abandonment of the great ideas or disbelief in their mastery, no enfeeblement of reason such as at this time walks hand in hand with the worship of the mere discursive intellect, no lack of joy and healthy vigour and keen inquiry and passionate interest in humanity.

Scarcely any special bias can be found running through his work; on the contrary, an incessant change of subject and manner, combined with a strong but not overweening individuality, raced, like blood through the body, through every vein of his labour.

Creative and therefore joyful, receptive and therefore thoughtful, at one with humanity and therefore loving; aspiring to God and believing in God, and therefore steeped to the lips in radiant Hope; at one with the past, passionate with the present, and possessing by faith an endless and glorious future--this was a life lived on the top of the wave, and moving with its motion from youth to manhood, from manhood to old age.
There is no need to mourn for his departure.

Nothing feeble has been done, nothing which lowers the note of his life, nothing we can regret as less than his native strength.

His last poem was like the last look of the Phoenix to the sun before the sunlight lights the odorous pyre from which the new-created Bird will spring.


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