Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/468

 Women," and the fervent invocations to E. B. B. dead, which open and close "The Ring and the Book." Never surely nobler love through life and death than that which inspired these in the man, and the "Sonnets from the Portuguese" in the woman.

6. Vitality.—Browning's immense range and depth of sympathy or geniality, which has been rightly con- sidered as of the essence of great genius, is naturally united if not identical with an intense and exuberant vitality, that "manly relish of life" which Lamb so well notes in Fielding; and this is all the more remarkable in these days, when so much of our poetic literature, whether in verse or prose, is, like Hamlet, "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," or altogether divorced and alien from the real living world. It does not come home to men's business and bosoms, so its cultivators and students are but a very small class apart, and, it must be admitted, not generally of robust natures. For myself, I have frequently been constrained to reflect, How small and weak are the singing birds! Browning, on the contrary, is one of the most robust of natures; nothing alive, or that has lived, is indifferent to him; there is no problem of life or death with which he fears to grapple; he has vital affinities with all things; and his genius appears but to grow in geniality, in hearty and manly relish of life, as he grows in age. He has, indeed, accumulated such inexhaustible stores of knowledge and thought that he seems of late years more and more hurrying to disburthen himself ere the inevitable end shall arrive. For his indestructible vital interest in the living world and hearty relish of life, take "At the Mermaid," in the Pacchiarotto