hat do they whisper thee,
Child of my bowels, Anselm? Ah, ye hope
To revel down my villas while I gasp
Bricked o'er with beggar's mouldy travertine,
Which Gandolf from his tomb-top chuckles at!
Nay, boys, ye love me--all of jasper, then!
'Tis jasper ye stand pledged to, lest I grieve
My bath must needs be left behind, alas!
One block, pure green as a pistachio-nut,
There's plenty jasper somewhere in the world--
And have I not Saint Praxed's ear to pray
Horses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts,
And mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs?
--That's if ye carve my epitaph aright,
Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully's every word,
No gaudy ware like Gandolf's second line--
Tully, my masters? Ulpian serves his need.'

"I know no other piece of modern English prose or poetry in
which there is so much told, as in these lines, of the
Renaissance spirit,--its worldliness, inconsistency, pride,
hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and
of good Latin. It is nearly all that I have said of the
central Renaissance in thirty pages of the _Stones of
Venice_, put into as many lines, Browning's also being the
antecedent work."[24]

This poem is the third of the iambic monologues, and, but for _Artemis
Prologizes_, the first in blank verse. I am not aware if it was written
much later than _Pictor Ignotus_, but it belongs to a later manner.
Scarcely at his very best, scarcely in the very greatest monologues of
the central series of _Men and Women_, or in these only, has Browning
written a finer or a more characteristic poem. As a study in human
nature it has all the concentrated truth, all the biting and imaginative
realism, of a scene from Balzac's _Comedie Humaine_: it is as much a
fact and a creation. It is, moreover, as Ruskin has told us, typical not
only of a single individual but of a whole epoch; while, as a piece of
metrical writing, it has all the originality of an innovation. If
Browning can scarcely be said to have created this species of blank
verse, half familiar, vivid with natural life, full of vigour and
beauty, rising and falling, with the unerring motion of the sea, he has
certainly adapted, perfected, and made it a new thing in his hands.

Akin to _The Tomb at St. Praxed's_ on its dramatic, though dissimilar on
its lyric, side, is the picturesque and t