Pro spice

== “Look forward” ( Dram at is Personæ , 1864) was written in the autumn following Mrs. Browning’s death. St. Paul speaks of those “who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage”: the author of Pro spice and the Epilogue to A solan do was not of this cla . Few men have written as nobly as he on the awful “minute of night,” and its fight with the “Arch Fear.” Estimating it at its fullest import, as only a great imaginative mind can do, he is in face of “the black minute” and “the power of the night”—the Mr. Great heart of the pilgrims to the dark river. Nothing grander has been written on the subject than the poems we have named. In the short poem Pro spice is concentrated the strength of a great soul and the courage of one who is prepared for the worst, with eyes unbandaged. As an example of the poet’s power nothing can be finer. The dramatic intensity of the opening lines—the fog, the mist, the snow, and the blasts which indicate the journey’s end, “the post of the foe”—is unsurpa ed even by Shakespeare himself. It is a defiance of death, a challenge to battle.