Starved, feasted, despaired,--been happy."

It is no accident that with the clearer recognition of sharp and
absolute loss Browning shows increasing preoccupation with the thought
of recovery after death. For himself death was now inseparably
intertwined with all that he had known of love, and the prospect of the
supreme reunion which death, as he believed, was to bring him, drew it
nearer to the core of his imagination and passion. Not that he looked
forward to it with the easy complacency of the hymn-writer. _Prospice_
would not be the great uplifting song it is were the note of struggle,
of heroic heart to bear the brunt and pay in one moment all "life's
arrears of pain, darkness, and cold," less clearly sounded; and were the
final cry less intense with the longing of bereavement. How near this
thought of rapturous reunion lay to the springs of Browning's
imagination at this time, how instantly it leapt into poetry, may be
seen from the _Eurydice to Orpheus_ which he fitly placed immediately
after these--

"But give them me, the mouth, the eyes, the brow!
Let them once more absorb me!"

But in two well-known poems of the _Dramatis Personæ_ Browning has
splendidly unfolded what is implicit in the strong simple clarion--note
of _Prospice_. _Abt Vogler_ and _Rabbi ben Ezra_ are among the surest
strongholds of his popular fame. _Rabbi ben Ezra_ is a great song of
life, bearing more fully perhaps than any other poem the burden of what
he had to say to his generation, but lifted far above mere didacticism
by the sustained glow in which ethical passion, and its imaginative
splendour, indistinguishably blend. It is not for nothing that Browning
put this loftiest utterance of all that was most strenuous in his own