Browning is to be buried in Westminster Abbey on the
last day of the year,—a decision in which the Dean of Westminster has been supported by the hearty appro- bation of all who have expressed their feeling on the subject. In poetic and artistic genius, the Laureate no doubt ranks above him ; but in the strength and fertility and vividness of his imaginative and intellectual life, Browning has had no superior during the generation which has lived since the death of Wordsworth. Cosmopolitan in his interests, pene- trating in his knowledge of men and women, and marvellously rich in the discernment and appreciation of new moral and intellectual conditions, Browning's poems range over a larger area of genuine human experience and motive than those of any other poet of the century. Moreover, all he has written has been ethically pure and intellectually bracing, marked almost uniformly by both courage and charity. His greatest poem, "The Ring and the Book," is as original as it is brilliant, and contains, too, much more than the usual pro- portion in his poems of genuine poetic force and feeling, though it contains, too, even more than the usual pro- portion of technical apparatus and of the display of strictly professional dexterities. It is a very great imaginative work, which but few of the poets commemorated in Westminster Abbey could rival, and still fewer could surpass. Browning's greatest imaginative characteristic was his inexhaustible fer- tility and variety ; his greatest fault was his frequent failure of imaginative dignity,–the too great familiarity of his poetic treatment.
