t length of convent-wall across the way
Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside;
The last monk leaves the garden; days decrease,
And autumn grows, autumn in everything.
Eh? the whole seems to fall into a shape
As if I saw alike my work and self
And all that I was born to be and do,
A twilight piece. Love, we are in God's hand.

In God's hand? Yes, but why being free are we so fettered? And here
slips in the unbidden guest of the theory. Andrea has chosen earthly
love; Lucrezia is all in all; and he has reached absolute perfection in
drawing--

I do what many dream of, all their lives.

He can reach out beyond himself no more. He has got the earth, lost the
heaven. He makes no error, and has, therefore, no impassioned desire
which, flaming through the faulty picture, makes it greater art
than his faultless work. "The soul is gone from me, that vext,
suddenly-impassioned, upward-rushing thing, with its play, insight,
broken sorrows, sudden joys, pursuing, uncontented life. These men reach
a heaven shut out from me, though they cannot draw like me. No praise or
blame affects me. I know my handiwork is perfect. But there burns a
truer light of God in them. Lucrezia, I am judged."

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for? All is silver-grey
Placid and perfect with my art:--the worse

"Here," he says, "is a piece of Rafael. The arm is out of drawing, and
I could make it right. But the passion, the soul of the thing is not in
me. Had you, my love, but urged me upward, to glory and God, I might
have been uncontent; I might have done it for you. No," and again he
sweeps round on himself, out of his excuses, "perhaps not, 'incentives
come from the soul's self'; and mine is gone. I've chosen the love of
you, Lucrezia, earth's love, and I cannot pass beyond my faultless
drawing into the strife to paint those divine imaginations the soul
conceives."

That is the meaning of Browning. The faultless, almost mechanical art,
the art which might be born of an adulterous connection between science
and art, is of little value to men. Not in the flawless painter is true
art found, but in those who painted inadequately, yet whose pictures
breathe

Infinite passion and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.

In this incessant strife to create new worlds, and in their creation,
which, always ending in partial failure, forces fresh effort, lies,
Bro