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day of his funeral services, a vast crowd gathered in his honour, young men and women forming a significant proportion of it.

The music chosen for the services was chiefly that which has been used in the Abbey at the burial of the illustrious dead for more than a century and a half; but the anthem following the lesson was composed by Dr. Bridge as a setting to the well-known words of Mrs. Browning:

What would we give to our beloved?
The hero's heart to be unmoved,

The poet's star-tuned harp to sweep,
The patriot's voice to teach and rouse,
The monarch's crown to light the brows?
"He giveth His beloved sleep."

O earth, so full of dreary noises !
O men, with wailing in your voices !
O delved gold, the wailers heap!

O strife, O curse, that o'er it fall!
God strikes a silence through you all,
And "giveth His beloved sleep."

His dews drop mutely on the hill,

His cloud above it saileth still,

Though on its slopes men sow and reap;
More softly than the dew is shed,

Or cloud is floated overhead,

"He giveth His beloved sleep."

Browning was buried in front of Chaucer's tomb, near Dryden's monument, and after the committal the whole congregation joined the choir in singing Watts's familiar hymn: "O God, our help in ages past.

Thus the national reward of genius was finally extended to him of whom Swinburne wrote:

O spirit of man, what mystery moves in thee
That he might know not of in spirit, and see
The heart within the heart that seems to strive,

The life within the life that seems to be,

And hear through all thy storms that whirl and drive
The living sound of all men's souls alive.

CHAPTER XI.

OPINIONS OF CONTEMPORARIES.

O the question, "Will his poetry live?" most of Browning's critics reply with little hesita

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tion; but the range is wide from those who think no jot or tittle of his work shall pass away to those who claim permanence for only the comparatively few poems that leap with vitality. Mr. Birrell, recalling the work of his middle period,—that fortunate period when "for the first time and the last time" he deigned to "breathe through silver,”declares that we "cannot think of him and the 'wormy bed' together. He is so unmistakably, deliciously alive." Perhaps no one thinking of his later poems, of The Ring and the Book, of Hohenstiel Schwangau, of The Inn Album, of Red Cotton Night-cap Country,-would utter precisely this sentiment, although there are not lacking disciples who believe one or another of these the masterpiece.

Certainly after 1868 something had departed from his style that formerly had given it what Mr. James calls "that slight but needful thing-charm." The