crave. He is half "incapable of his own distress"; his strongest
emotions are a flitting hope or a momentary pang, quickly dissolved into
the ground-tone of mournful yet serene contemplation, which seems to
float ghostlike in the void between grief and joy. Reproach turns to
grateful acquiescence on his lips; the sting of blighted genius is
instantly annulled by the momentary enchantment of her smile, whose
worth he knows too well and remembers too soon:--

"And you smile indeed!
This hour has been an hour! Another smile?
If you would sit thus by me every night
I should work better, do you comprehend?
I mean that I should earn more, give you more."

The tragedy is for us, not for him: he regrets little, and would change
still less. The "silver-grey" lights of dreamy autumn eve were never
with more delicate insight rendered in terms of soul.

Suddenly these autumnal half-tones give way to the flash of torches in
the fragrant darkness of an Italian night. There is a scurry of feet
along a dark alley, a scuffle at the end, and the genial rotundity of
Brother Lippo Lippi's face, impudent, brilliant, insuppressible, leers
into the torchlight. _Fra Lippo Lippi_ is not less true and vivacious
than the _Andrea_, if less striking as an example of Browning's dramatic
power. Sarto is a great poetic creation; Browning's own robust
temperament provided hardly any aid in delineating the emaciated soul
whose gifts had thinned down to a morbid perfection of technique. But
this vigorous human creature, with the teeming brain, and the realist
eye, and the incorrigible ineptitude for the restraints of an insincere
clerical or other idealism, was a being to which Browning's heart went