DP piece for whose speaker ‘The best is yet to be’ (2). L 4.52 suggests 1862 as a probable date. Ben Ezra and his philosophy derive loosely from the Jewish scholar Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra (1092/3–1167). See L 4.53–4 for the poem as a reply to the pessimism of *Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna (1852) I.2.77–426 and Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam (1859), the desire for early death in Christina Rossetti’s ‘The Martyr’ (1847) and the negative picture of old age in *Tennyson’s ‘Tithonus’ (1860).