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 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 passed 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 Yet a still more vital change comes over our relations to the imaginative creator when his bodily presence is withdrawn.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-