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George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Browning, Newman
George Eliot Matthew Arnold Browning Newman Author:Joseph Jacobs Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ROBERT BROWNING NE by one the Dii majores are leaving us: Carlyle, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold; and now Robert Browning, a greater name than all these, has p... more »assed into silence. It is almost startling to notice how their death radically alters their relation to us. Not only is their work rounded off, finished in a double sense, completed into a system, informed with a new life, as if, indeed, the poet's soul had passed at once from the body to the works. The poet has gone; his works at once group themselves into an organic whole, and become his work. Yet a still more vital change comes over our relations to the imaginative creator when his bodily presence is withdrawn. He ceases to be ours alone; Robert Browning no longer speaks only for and to Victorian England. He becomes part of England of the past and of the future—part of the spiritual heritage for which Englishmen have in the past shown themselves willing to die—part of the English ideal, towards which the best of Englishmen aim to live. One advantage immediately accrues from the ces- G sation of all personal intercourse between the world and the poet. The idle chatter of relative merit, ' Is he greater than A ?' ' Is he better than B ?' dies away with his death. Not how great he was, but what he was, engages our attention, and the searching demand that the soul of Robert Browning makes upon each and all of us who care for the higher life of our nation is, ' What I have done for England, say.' The kingdom of poesy hath many mansions. That on whose portals Robert Browning's name is inscribed is distinguished from its neighbours both by its huge size and by its massive strength. The style is Gothic with a curious infusion of Italian Renaissance. Notice, before we enter, the quaint gargoyles that in part adorn, in part...« less