present phase of Browning's work. These were confessedly incomplete, but
Browning was content to let them go forth as they were, and less bent
upon even their ultimate completion, it would seem, than Miss Barrett,
who bade him "remember" that the poem was "there only as a first part,
and that the next parts must certainly follow and complete what will be
a great lyrical work--now remember."[24] And the "next parts" when they
came, in _Men and Women_, bore the mark of his ten years' fellowship
with her devout and ecstatic soul, as well as of his own growth towards
the richer and fuller harmonies of verse. The 1845 fragment falls, of
course, far short of its sequel in imaginative audacity and splendour,
but it is steeped in a pellucid beauty which Browning's busy
intellectuality was too prone to dissipate. Kenyon read it nightly, as
he told Mrs Browning, "to put his dreams in order"; finely comparing it
to "Homer's Shield of Achilles, thrown into lyrical whirl and life." And
certainly, if Browning anywhere approaches that Greek plasticity for
which he cared so little, it is in these exquisitely sculptured yet
breathing scenes. Then, as the young singer kindles to his work, his
song, without becoming less transparent, grows more personal and
impassioned; he no longer repeats the familiar chants of his tribe, but
breaks into a new impetuous inspiration of his own; the lyrical whirl
and life gathers swiftness and energy, and the delicate bas-reliefs of
Saul's people, in their secular pieties of grief or joy, merge in the
ecstatic vision of Saul himself, as he had once been, and as he might
yet be, that

"boyhood of wonder and hope,
Present promise and wealth of the future beyond the eye's scope,"

all the fulness and glory of the life of humanity gathered upon his
single head. It is the very voice of life, which thrills and strikes