writes in the album and gives to the lady to read. The poem is too long
to quote in full. The closing scene, however, will give the reader a
good idea of the poet's handling of this nineteenth-century tragedy.

The true nobility of soul of the younger man links him with Mertoun
among Browning's heroes and represents the Englishman or the man of any
country for that matter at his highest. Whether redemption for the older
man would have been possible had the lady believed him in the inn parlor
is doubtful. Such natures are like Ibsen's "Peer Gynt." They need to be
put into a button mould and moulded over again.

"Here's the lady back!
So, Madam, you have conned the Album-page
And come to thank its last contributor?
How kind and condescending! I retire
A moment, lest I spoil the interview,
And mar my own endeavor to make friends--
You with him, him with you, and both with me!
If I succeed--permit me to inquire
Five minutes hence! Friends bid good-by, you know."
And out he goes.

VII

She, face, form, bearing, one
Superb composure--

"He has told you all?
Yes, he has told you all, your silence says--
What gives him, as he thinks the mastery
Over my body and my soul!--has told
That instance, even, of their servitude
He now exacts of me? A silent blush!
That's well, though better would white ignorance
Beseem your brow, undesecrate before--
Ay, when I left you! I too learn at last
--Hideously learned as I seemed so late--
What sin may swell to. Yes,--I needed learn
That, when my prophet's rod became the snake
I fled from, it would, one day, swallow up
--Incorporate whatever serpentine
Falsehood and treason and unmanliness
Beslime earth's pavement: such the power of Hell,
And so beginning, ends no otherwise
The Adversary! I was ignorant,
Blameworthy--if you will; but blame I take
Nowise upon me as I ask myself
--_You_--how can you, whose soul I seemed to read
The limpid eyes through, have declined so deep
Even with him for consort? I revolve
Much memory, pry into the looks and words
Of that day's walk beneath the College wall,
And nowhere can distinguish, in what gleams
Only pure marble through my dusky past,
A dubious cranny where such poison-seed
Might harbor, nourish what shoul