lovely sadness, of a picture of Burne
Jones. Its delicately fantastic colouring, its dreamy passion, and the
sad and quiet sweetness of its verse, have some affinity with _St.
Martin's Summer_, but are unlike anything else in Browning. It is the
utterance of a hopeless-hoping and pathetically resigned love: the love
of a merely human man for an angelically pure and unhumanly cold woman,
who requires in him an unattainable union of immaculate purity and
complete experience of life.

"Still you stand, still you listen, still you smile!
Still melts your moonbeam through me, white awhile,
Softening, sweetening, till sweet and soft
Increase so round this heart of mine, that oft
I could believe your moonbeam smile has past
The pallid limit and, transformed at last,
Lies, sunlight and salvation--warms the soul
It sweetens, softens!

* * * * *

What means the sad slow silver smile above
My clay but pity, pardon?--at the best,
But acquiescence that I take my rest,
Contented to be clay, while in your heaven
The sun reserves love for the Spirit-Seven
Companioning God's throne they lamp before,
--Leaves earth a mute waste only wandered o'er
By that pale soft sweet disempassioned moon
Which smiles me slow forgiveness! Such the boon
I beg? Nay, dear ...
Love, the love whole and sole without alloy!"

The action of this soul's tragedy takes place under "the light that
never was on sea or land": it is the tragedy of a soul, but of a
disembodied soul.

_A Forgiveness_ is a drama of this world. It is the legitimate successor
of the monologues of _Men and Women_; it may, indeed, be most precisely
compared with an earlier monologue, _My Last Duchess_; and it is, like
these, the concentrated essence of a complete tragedy. Like all the best
of Browning's poems, it is thrown into a striking situation, and
developed from this central point. It is the story of a love merged in
contempt, quenched in hate, and rekindled in a fatal forgiveness, told
in confession to a monk by the man whom the monk has wronged. The
personage who speaks is one of the most sharply-outlined characters in
Browning: a clear, cold, strong-willed man, implacable in love or hate.
He tells his story in a quiet, measured, utterly unemotional manner,
with reflective interruptions and explanations, the acute analysis of