re.
Here--here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,
Lightnings are loosened,
Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm,
Peace let the dew send!
Lofty designs must close in like effects:
Loftily lying,
Leave him--still loftier than the world suspects,
Living or dying."

The union of humour with intense seriousness, of the grotesque with the
stately, is one that only Browning could have compassed, and the effect
is singularly appropriate. As the disciples of the old humanist bear
their dead master up to his grave on the mountain-top, chanting their
dirge and eulogy, the lines of the poem seem actually to move to the
steady climbing rhythm of their feet.

_The Heretic's Tragedy: a Middle-Age Interlude_, is described by the
author as "a glimpse from the burning of Jacques du Bourg-Molay [last
Grand-Master of the Templars], A.D. 1314, as distorted by the refraction
from Flemish brain to brain during the course of a couple of centuries."
Of all Browning's mediaeval poems this is perhaps the greatest, as it is
certainly the most original, the most astonishing. Its special "note" is
indescribable, for there is nothing with which we can compare it. If I
say that it is perhaps the finest example in English poetry of the pure
grotesque, I shall fail to interpret it aright to those who think of the
grotesque as a synonym for the ugly and debased. If I call it fantastic,
I shall do it less than justice in suggesting a certain lightness and
flimsiness which are quite alien to its profound seriousness, a
seriousness which touches on sublimity. Browning's power of sculpturing
single situations is seldom shown in finer relief than in those poems in
which he has seized upon some "occult eccentricity of history" or of
legend, like this of _The Heretic's Tragedy_, or that in _Holy-Cross
Day_, fashioning it into some quaint, curt, tragi-comic form.
_Holy-Cross Day_ expresses the feelings of the Jews, who were forced on
this day (the 14th September) to attend an annual Christian sermon in
Rome. A deliciously naive extract from an imaginary _Diary by the
Bishop's Secretary_, 1600, first sets forth the orthodox view of the
case; then the poem tells us "what the Jews really said." Nothing more
audaciously or more sardonically mirthful was ever written than the
first part of this poem, with its

"Fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak!
Blessedest