Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made. Our times are in his hand.

These lines come from Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” first published in his collection *Dramatis Personae* (1864). Browning writes in the voice of the medieval Jewish philosopher Abraham ibn Ezra (“Rabbi Ben Ezra”), reflecting on aging, providence, and the shaping of the soul over a lifetime. The poem belongs to Browning’s mid-career period, when he frequently used historical or imagined speakers to explore moral and spiritual questions. In Victorian Britain—an era preoccupied with faith, doubt, and progress—the poem offered a bracingly affirmative vision of later life as purposeful rather than merely declining.

The speaker invites a companion to embrace aging as a shared journey, insisting that life’s “best” meaning may arrive late rather than early. The “last of life” is portrayed as the culmination for which youth and struggle were preparatory—suggesting that experience, character, and spiritual insight ripen over time. “Our times are in his hand” frames this optimism within providence: human life unfolds under divine governance, so apparent losses or limitations of age can be reinterpreted as part of a larger design. The passage has endured as a consoling, forward-looking meditation on mortality and the value of endurance.

1) “Grow old along with me! / The best is yet to be.”
2) “Grow old along with me; / The best is yet to be.”
3) “The best is yet to come.”