s heart by day, the wife of his breast by night!'
'And the beaten in speed!' wept Hoseyn: 'You never have loved
my Pearl!'"

There remain _Pietro of Abano_[56] and _Doctor_ ----. The latter, a
Talmudic legend, is probably the poorest of Browning's poems: it is
rather farce than humour. The former is a fine piece of genuine
grotesque art, full of pungent humour, acuteness, worldly wisdom, and
clever phrasing and rhyming. It is written in an elaborate comic metre
of Browning's invention, indicated at the end by eight bars of music.
The poem is one of the most characteristic examples of that "Teutonic
grotesque, which lies in the expression of deep ideas through fantastic
forms," a grotesque of noble and cultivated art, of which Browning is as
great a master in poetry as Carlyle in prose.

The volume ends with a charming lyrical epilogue, not without its
personal bearing, though it has sometimes, very unfairly, been
represented as a piece of mere self-gratulation.

"Thus I wrote in London, musing on my betters,"

Browning tells us in some album-verses which have found their way into
print, and he naturally complains that what he wrote of Dante should be
foisted upon himself. Indeed, he has quite as much the characteristics
of the "spontaneous" as of the "brooding" poet of his parable.

"'Touch him ne'er so lightly, into song he broke:
Soil so quick-receptive,--not one feather-seed,
Not one flower-dust fell, but straight its fall awoke
Vitalising virtue: song would song succeed
Sudden as spontaneous--prove a poet soul!'
Indeed?
Rock's the song-soil rather, surface hard and bare:
Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage
Vainly both expend,--few flowers awaken there:
Quiet in its cleft broods--what the after age
Knows and names a pine, a nation's heritage."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 56: Pietro of Abano was an Italian physician, alchemist and
philosopher, born at Abano, near Padua, in 1246, died about 1320. He had
the reputation of a wizard, and was imprisoned by the Inquisition. He
was condemned to be burnt; he died in prison, and his dead body was
ordered to be burnt; but as that had been taken away by his friends, the
Inquisition burnt his portrait. His reputed antipathy to milk and
cheese, with its natural analogy, suggested the motive of the poem. The
book referred to in it is his pr