And put it in my bosom, and all at once
I felt his arms about me, and his lips -
Mary. O God! I have been too slack, too slack;
There are Hot Gospellers even among our guards -
Nobles we dared not touch. We have but burnt
The heretic priest, workmen, and women and children.
Wet, famine, ague, fever, storm, wreck, wrath, -
We have so play'd the coward; but by God's grace,
We'll follow Philip's leading, and set up
The Holy Office here--garner the wheat,
And burn the tares with unquenchable fire!"


The conclusion, in the acting edition, printed in the Biography,
appears to be an improvement on that in the text as originally
published. Unhappy as the drama essentially is, the welcome which Mr
Browning gave both to the published work and to the acted play--"a
complete success": "conception, execution, the whole and the parts,
I see nowhere the shadow of a fault"--offers "relief" in actual human
nature. "He is the greatest-brained poet in England," Tennyson said,
on a later occasion. "Violets fade, he has given me a crown of
gold."

Before writing Harold (1876) the poet "studied many recent plays,"
and re-read AEschylus and Sophocles. For history he went to the
Bayeux tapestry, the Roman de Rou, Lord Lytton, and Freeman.
Students of a recent controversy will observe that, following
Freeman, he retains the famous palisade, so grievously battered by
the axe-strokes of Mr Horace Round. Harold is a piece more
compressed, and much more in accordance with the traditions of the