Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 150.djvu/301

on principle, refused to brood upon sorrow or entertain pain, at the human succour that lay in his way. His sociability, his biographer thinks, was in great measure due to a nervous impulse which drove him into society because he would so much rather have been alone. “That effusiveness of manner with which he greeted alike old friends and new arose also from a momentary want of self possession.” This means, we presume, that the poet was subject to the English malady of shyness, and exorcised that demon only by going to the opposite extreme. Mrs Sutherland Orr adds, “He never failed in a sympathetic response or a playful retort; he was always provided with the exact counter requisite in a game of words,”—a phrase which reminds us of the art of conversation in an American novel, rather than the natural human utterance of a well-bred Englishman. What it is intended to mean, we suppose, is that Mr Browning was a good, but not a specially distinguished, talker. He was to be seen everywhere about London a few years ago,—in the houses of the great and the houses of the small, wherever men and women congregated and talked, wherever there were pleasant people to be met; it might almost be said, wherever there was a crowd—we should say, with an almost undiscriminating readiness to accept any invitation, were it not that, as a matter of fact, eminent persons in London society are singularly undiscriminating, and are to be met often in places most inappropriate, where nobody would expect to see them—lured thither, perhaps, by the mere chance of meeting others of their own kind similarly out of place, or by the importunity of hosts hoping to gain a social step by their means. Whether drawn by one or other of these inducements, certain it is that Mr Browning’s characteristic head and figure, spruce, cordial, and vivacious, were to be seen everywhere almost, always accompanied, at least in later days, by the faithful sister who was his constant companion. Everybody remembers his death in the Venetian palace, which it was so great a pleasure to him to secure as his son’s home; and how his last volume of poems, containing his last words to the world, was published on the day he died; and how Venice carried him in state over the lagoon to be laid in St Michele; and how his native country claimed him, and he was brought back to England and laid in Westminster. He had not been understood, nor had he received his due meed of fame for half of his career. In compensation, no poet, perhaps, has had so great a public recognition at the end of his life, or so noble a burying among his peers.

He had already told us in his last written words how to regard him. Will you think of me, he asks in the Epilogue, which he himself speaks at the end of his long drama, eighty years of human labour and progress—at midnight, in silence and sadness—pity me, perhaps, for being dead? Pity me, being what I was! What was I?—