moments which habitually caught
Browning's eye. Only, in their case, the decisive moment was not one of
the revealing crises which laid bare their utmost depths, but a crisis
which temporarily invested them with a capricious effulgence. Yet these
instantaneous transformations have a peculiar charm for Browning; they
touch and fall in with his fundamental ideas of life; and the delicious
prologue and epilogue hint these graver analogies in a dainty music
which pleasantly relieves the riotous uncouthness of the tale itself.
If Rene's life is suddenly lighted up, so is the moss bank with the
"blue flash" of violets in spring; and the diplomatic sister through
whose service Paul wins his laurels has a more spiritual comrade in the
cicada, who, with her little heart on fire, sang forth the note of the
broken string and won her singer his prize. Browning's pedestrian verse
passes into poetry as he disengages from the transient illusions, the
flickerings and bickerings, of Fame, the eternal truth of Love. But it
is only in the closing stanzas of the main poem that his thought clearly
emerges; when, having exposed the vanity of fame as a test of poetic
merit, he asks how, then, poets shall be tried; and lays down the
characteristic criterion, a happy life. But it is the happiness of Rabbi
ben Ezra, a joy three parts pain, the happiness won not by ignoring evil
but by mastering it!--

"So, force is sorrow, and each sorrow, force:
What then? since Swiftness gives the charioteer
The palm, his hope be in the vivid horse
Whose neck God clothed with thunder, not the steer
Sluggish and safe! Yoke Hatred, Crime, Remorse,
Despair: but ever mid the whirling fear
Let, through the tumult, break the poet's face
Radiant, assured his wild slaves win the race!"

CHAPTER VIII.

THE LAST DECADE.

Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiled.

Since the catastrophe of 1861 Browning had not entered Italy. In the
autumn of 1878 he once more bent his steps thither. Florence, indeed, he
refused to revisit; it was burnt in upon his brain by memories
intolerably dear. But in Venice the charm of Italy reasserted itself,
and he returned during his remaining autumns with increasing frequency
to the old-fashioned hostelry, Dell' Universo, on the Grand Canal, or
latterly, to the second home provided by the hospitality of his gifted
and congenial American friend, Mrs Arthur Bronson