and, losing
all heart and hope, sank into the cold correctness, the unerring
fluency, the uniform, melancholy repetition of a single type, his
wife's, which distinguish his later works. Browning has taken his facts
from Vasari, and he has taken them quite literally. But what a change,
what a transformation and transfiguration! Instead of a piece of prose
biography and criticism, we have (in Mr. Swinburne's appropriate words)
"the whole man raised up and reclothed with flesh." No more absolutely
creative work has been done in our days; few more beautiful and pathetic
poems written. The mood of sad, wistful, hopeless mournfulness of
resignation which the poem expresses, is a somewhat rare one with
Browning's vivid and vivacious genius. It is an autumn twilight piece.

"A common greyness silvers everything,--
All in a twilight, you and I alike
--You, at the point of your first pride in me
(That's gone, you know),--but I, at every point;
My youth, my hope, my art, being all toned down
To yonder sober pleasant Fiesole.
There's the bell clinking from the chapel top;
That length of convent-wall across the way
Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside;
The last monk leaves the garden; days decrease,
And autumn grows, autumn in everything.
Eh, the whole seems to fall into a shape
As if I saw alike my work and self
And all that I was born to be and do,
A twilight-piece."

The very movement of the lines, their tone and touch, contribute to the
effect. A single clear impression is made to result from an infinity of
minute, scarcely appreciable touches: how fine these touches are, how
clear the impression, can only be hinted at in words, can be realised
only by a loving and scrupulous study.

Whether the picture which suggested the poem is an authentic work of
Andrea, or whether, as experts have now agreed, it is a work by an
unknown artist representing an imaginary man and woman is, of course, of
no possible consequence in connection with the poem. Nor is it of any
more importance that the Andrea of Vasari is in all probability not the
real Andrea. Historic fact has nothing to do with poetry: it is mere
material, the quarry of ideas; and the real truth of Browning's portrait
of Andrea would no more be impugned by the establishment of Vasari's
inaccuracy, than the real truth of Shakespeare's portrait of Macbeth by
the proof of the untr