true to England and to the time in its heartiness and gallant bluffness.
The leap-up of pride and joy in a boy's heart at the moment of death in
his Emperor's cause could hardly be more intensely imagined than it is
in the poem of the French camp, and all is made more real and vivid by
the presence of that motionless figure, intent on victory and sustaining
the weight of imperial anxieties, which yet cannot be quite impassive in
presence of a death so devoted. And side by side with this poem of
generous enthusiasm is placed the poem of passion reduced to its extreme
of meanness, its most contracted form of petty spite and base envy--the
_Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister_; a grotesque insect, spitting
ineffectual poison, is placed under the magnifying-glass of the comic
spirit, and is discovered to be--a brother in religion! A noble hatred,
transcending personal considerations, mingles with a noble and solemn
love--the passion of country--in the Italian exile's record of his
escape from Austrian pursuers; with the clear-obscure of his patriotic
melancholy mingles the proud recollection of the Italian woman who was
his saviour, over whose conjectured happiness as peasant wife and
peasant mother the exile bows with a tender joy. The examples of
abnormal passion are two--that of the amorous homicide who would set on
one perfect moment the seal of eternity, in _Porphyria's Lover_, and
that of the other occupier of the mad-house cells, Johannes Agricola,
whose passion of religion is pushed to the extreme of a mystical
antinomianism.

Browning's poems of the love of man and woman are seldom a simple
lyrical cry, but they are not on this account the less true in their
presentment of that curious masquer and disguiser--Love. When love takes
possession of a nature which is complex, affluents and tributaries from
many and various faculties run into the main stream. With Browning the
passion is indeed a regal power, but intellect, imagination, fancy are