ROBERT BROWNING
Approach not Robert Browning ye who want
Success, tranquillity, or peace of life;
Solution of conflicts, and harmony
Do not furnish themes of his plays, songs, and tales.
A deep plunge he took into vital sap
To perceive, explain, convey life's own being;
Life is but movement, unrest, revolution,—
A story of fight and grand defeat.
Man is not he who is content with success.
He is man indeed who ever failure seeks;
Daily to seize fresh future is his one care.
To grasp the moon, up into the skies to fly.
Hair-splitting critic is Browning; he paints
Eternal soul and finite body's strife;
Heroes, hermits, lovers, priests, scholars,—all
Bear on flesh and blood endless yearning's marks.
Wildly in the breast of men and women
Surges the same Paracelsian word:
"Immense am I, immortal is myself.
Grow I would, break I would, though bound in mud."
Life is not in any moment exhausted,
In any nucleus, person, or race;
To fail is the nature progressive man's.
New hopes live on through despair, doubt, death.
Teacher of efforts, of fruition careless,
O thou world's greatest, best critic of life!
Thine is the modern Geeta's gospel of hope
And work for its own sake, O seer, energist bold!
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