Enormous problems, and yet more enormous answers, about pain, prayer, destiny, liberty, and conscience are suggested by cherries, by the sun, by a melon-seller, by an eagle flying in the sky, by a man tilling a plot of ground.

It is this spirit of grotesque allegory which really characterises Browning among all other poets.

Other poets might possibly have hit upon the same philosophical idea--some idea as deep, as delicate, and as spiritual.
But it may be safely asserted that no other poet, having thought of a deep, delicate, and spiritual idea, would call it "A Bean Stripe; also Apple Eating." Three more years passed, and the last book which Browning published in his lifetime was _Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day_, a book which consists of apostrophes, amicable, furious, reverential, satirical, emotional to a number of people of whom the vast majority even of cultivated people have never heard in their lives--Daniel Bartoli, Francis Furini, Gerard de Lairesse, and Charles Avison.

This extraordinary knowledge of the fulness of history was a thing which never ceased to characterise Browning even when he was unfortunate in every other literary quality.

Apart altogether from every line he ever wrote, it may fairly be said that no mind so rich as his ever carried its treasures to the grave.