"stood and watched the cobbler at his trade, ...
If any beat a horse, you felt he saw,
If any cursed a woman, he took note,"--

and all this, for Browning, went to the making of the poet, but we get
no inkling of the process itself. Browning had, in his obscure as in his
famous days, peculiar opportunities of measuring the perversities of
popular repute. Later on, in the heyday of his renown, he chaffed its
critical dispensers in his most uproarious vein in _Pacchiarotto_. The
_Popularity_ stanzas present us with a theory of it conveyed in that
familiar manner of mingled poetry and grotesqueness which was one of the
obstacles to his own.

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:--