Thursday's the fat of the week;"

while the sudden transition to the sublime and steadfast Song of Death
of Rabbi ben Ezra is an effect worthy of Heine: more than worthy. Heine
would inevitably have put his tongue in his cheek again at the end.

With the three great mediaeval poems should be named the slighter sketch
of _Protus_. The first and last lines, describing two imaginary busts,
are a fine instance of Browning's power of translating sense into sound.
Compare the smooth and sweet melody of the opening lines--

"Among these latter busts we count by scores
Half-emperors and quarter-emperors,

* * * * *

One loves a baby-face, with violets there--
Violets instead of laurels in the hair,--
As they were all the little locks could bear"--

with the rasping vigour and strength of sound which point the contrast
of the conclusion:--

"Here's John the Smith's rough-hammered head. Great eye,
Gross jaw and griped lips do what granite can
To give you the crown-grasper. What a man!"

One poem of absolutely unique order is the romance of "_Childe Roland to
the Dark Tower came_." If it were not for certain lines, certain
metaphors and images, here and there in his earlier works, we should
find in this poem an exception to the rule of Browning's work so
singular and startling as to be almost phenomenal. But in passages of
_Pauline_, of _Paracelsus_, of the lyric written in 1836, and
incorporated, more than twenty years later, with _James Lee's Wife_, we
have distinct evidence of a certain reserve, as it were, of romantic
sensibility, a certain tendency, which we may consider to have been
consciously checked rather than early exhausted, towards the weird and
fanciful. In _Childe Roland_ all this latent sensibility receives full
and final expression. The poem is very generally supposed to be an
allegory, and a number of ingenious interpretations have been suggested,
and the "Dark Tower" has been defined as Love, Life, Death and Truth.
But, as a matter of fact, Browning, in writing it, had no allegorical
intention whatever. It was meant to be, and is, a pure romance. It was
suggested by the line from Shakespeare which heads it, and was "built
up," in Mrs. Orr's words "of picturesque impressions, which have
separately or collectively produced themselves in the author's mind, ...
including a tower which Mr. Browning once saw in the Carrara Mo