ether, but the flight, postponed
for ever, never comes to pass. Browning characteristically blames them
for their sin of "the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin," for their
vacillating purpose, their failure in attaining "their life's set end,"
whatever that end might be. Despite the difficulty of the metre, the
verse is singularly fresh and musical. In this poem, the first in which
Browning has used the _terza rima_, he observes, with only occasional
licence, the proper pause at the end of each stanza of three lines. This
law, though rarely neglected by Dante, has seldom been observed by the
few English poets who have attempted the measure. Neither Byron in the
_Prophecy of Dante_, nor Shelley in _The Triumph of Life_, nor Mrs.
Browning in _Casa Guidi Windows_, has done so. In Browning's later poems
in this metre, the pause, as if of set purpose, is wholly disregarded.

_How it strikes a Contemporary_ is at once a dramatic monologue and a
piece of poetic criticism. Under the Spanish dress, and beneath the
humorous treatment, it is easy to see a very distinct, suggestive and
individual theory of poetry, and in the poet who "took such cognizance
of men and things, ...

"Of all thought, said and acted, then went home
And wrote it fully to our Lord the King--"

we have, making full allowance for the imaginary dramatic circumstances,
a very good likeness of a poet of Browning's order. Another poem,
"_Transcendentalism_," is a slighter piece of humorous criticism,
possibly self-criticism, addressed to one who "speaks" his thoughts
instead of "singing" them. Both have a penetrating quality of beauty in
familiarity.

_Before_ and _After_, which mean before and after the duel, realise
between them a single and striking situation. _Before_ is spoken by a
friend of the wronged man; _After_ by the wronged man himself. The
latter is not excelled by any poem of Browning's in its terrible
conciseness, the intensity of its utterance of stifled passion.

"AFTER.

"Take the cloak from his face, and at first
Let the corpse do its worst!

"How he lies in his rights of a man!
Death has done all death can.
And, absorbed in the new life he leads,
He recks not, he heeds
Nor his wrong nor my vengeance; both strike
On his senses alike,
And are lost in the solemn and strange
Surprise of the change.

Ha, what avails death to erase
His o