of the sevenfold dragon's watch. Sirs,
I obeyed. Obedience was too strange,--this new thing that had been
STRUCK INTO ME BY THE LOOK OF THE LADY, to dare disobey
the first authoritative word. 'Twas God's. I had been
LIFTED TO THE LEVEL OF HER, could take such sounds into my sense.
I said, `We two are cognizant o' the Master now; it is she bids me
bow the head: how true, I am a priest! I see the function here;
I thought the other way self-sacrifice: this is the true,
seals up the perfect sum. I pay it, sit down, silently obey.'"

Numerous and varied expressions of the idea of conversion set forth
in this passage, occur in Browning's poetry, evidencing his deep sense
of this great and indispensable condition of soul-life,
of being born anew (or from above, as it should be rendered
in the Gospel, a'/nwqen, that is, through the agency of
a higher personality), in order to see the kingdom of God--
evidencing his conviction that "the kingdom of God cometh not
with observation: for lo! the kingdom of God is within you."
In the poem entitled `Cristina', the speaker is made to say,--

"Oh, we're sunk enough here, God knows! but not quite so sunk
that moments,
Sure tho' seldom, are denied us, when the spirit's true endowments
Stand out plainly from its false ones, and apprise it if pursuing
Or the right way or the wrong way, to its triumph or undoing.

There are flashes struck from midnights, there are fire-flames
noon-days kindle,
Whereby piled-up honors perish, whereby swollen ambitions dwindle,
While just this or that poor impulse, which for once had play unstifled,
Seems the sole work of a life-time that away the rest have trifled."

And again, when the Pope in `The Ring and the Book' has come
to the decision to sign the death-warrant of Guido and his accomplices,
he says: "For the main criminal I have no hope except in such
a SUDDENNESS OF FATE. I stood at Naples once, a night so dark
I could have scarce conjectured there was earth anywhere, sky or sea
or world at all: but the night's black was burst through by a blaze--
thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore,
through her whole length of mountain visible: there lay the city
thick and plain with spires, and, like a ghost disshrouded,
white the sea. SO MAY THE TRUTH BE FLASHED OUT BY ONE BLOW,
AND GUIDO SEE, ONE INSTANT, AND BE SAVED. Else I avert my face,
nor follow him into that sad obscure sequestere