"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