An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry

Apparent Failure.

The poet, it appears, speaks here in his own person. Sauntering about Paris, he comes upon the Doric little Morgue, the dead-house, where they show their drowned. He enters, and sees through the screen of glass, the bodies of three men who committed suicide, the day before, by drowning themselves in the Seine.

In the last stanza, he gives expression to his hopeful philosophy, which recognizes “some soul of goodness, in things evil”; * which sees in human nature, “potentiality of final deliverance from the evil in it, given only time enough for the work”. In this age of professed and often, no doubt, affected, agnosticism and pessimism, Browning is the foremost apostle of Hope. He, more than any other great author of the age, whether philosopher, or poet, or divine, has been inspired with the faith that

               “a sun will pierce
     The thickest cloud earth ever stretched;
     That, after Last, returns the First,
     Though a wide compass round be fetched;
     That what began best, can’t end worst,
     Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst.”
 
    —
     * ‘Henry V.’, IV. 1. 4.
    —

Compare with this, the following stanzas from Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’, Section 54:—

     “Oh yet we trust that somehow good
     Will be the final goal of ill,
     To pangs of nature, sins of will,
     Defects of doubt, and taints of blood.

     That nothing walks with aimless feet;
     That not one life shall be destroyed,
     Or cast as rubbish to the void,
     When God hath made the pile complete.