lly justifying his past, now
musing, half wistfully, half ironically, over all that he might have
been and was not. At the outset we see him complacently enough
intrenched within a strong position, that of the consistent opportunist,
who made the best of what he found, not a creator but a conservator,
"one who keeps the world safe." But he has ardent ideas and
aspirations. The freedom of Italy has kindled his imagination, and in
the grandest passage of the poem he broods over his frustrate but
deathless dream:--

"Ay, still my fragments wander, music-fraught,
Sighs of the soul, mine once, mine now, and mine
For ever! Crumbled arch, crushed aqueduct,
Alive with tremors in the shaggy growth
Of wild-wood, crevice-sown, that triumphs there,
Imparting exultation to the hills."

[Footnote 57: _Letters of E.B.B._, ii. 385.]

But if he had abandoned these generous dreams, he had won free trade and
given the multitude cheap bread, and in a highly ingenious piece of
sophistry he explains, by the aid of the gospel of Evolution, how men
are united by their common hunger, and thrust apart by their conflicting
ideas. But Hohenstiel knows very well that his intrenchments are not
unassailable; and he goes on to compose an imaginary biography of
himself as he might have been, with comments which reflect his actual
course. The finest part of this aethereal voyage is that in which his
higher unfulfilled self pours scorn upon the paltry duplicities of the
"Peace" policy by which his actual and lower self had kept on good terms
abroad, and beguiled the imperious thirst for "la gloire" at home.
Indignantly the author of _Herve Riel_ asks why "the more than all
magnetic race" should have to court its rivals by buying their goods
untaxed, or guard against them by war for war's sake, when Mother Earth
has no pride above her pride in that same

"race all flame and air
And aspiration to the boundless Great,
The incommensurably Beautiful--
Whose very falterings groundward come of flight
Urged by a pinion all too passionate
For heaven and what it holds of gloom and glow."

_The Ring and the Book_ had made Browning famous. But fame was far from
tempting him to undue compliance with the tastes of his new-won public;
rather it prompted him to indulge his genius more freely, and to go his
own way with a more complete security and unconcern.
_Hohenstiel-Schwang