n, while the historian is busied only with the results growing
out of the moving force of feeling.

The egotism of the Ferrara husband outraged at the gentle wife because
she is as gracious toward those who rendered her small courtesies,
and seemed as thankful to them as she was to him for his gift of a
nine-hundred-years-old name, opens up for inspection the heart of a
husband at a time when men exercised complete control over their wives,
and could satisfy their jealous, selfish instincts by any cruel methods
they chose to adopt, with no one to say them "nay." The highly developed
artistic sense shown by this husband is not incompatible with his
consummate selfishness and cruelty, as many tales of that time might be
brought forward to illustrate. The husband in "The Statue and the Bust"
belongs to the same type, and the situation there is the inevitable
outcome of a civilization in which women were not consulted as to whom
they would marry, and naturally often fell a prey to love if it should
come to them afterwards. Weakness of will in the case of the lovers in
this poem wrecked their lives; for they were not strong enough to follow
either duty or love. Another glimpse is caught of this period when
husbands and brothers and fathers meted out what they considered justice
to the women in "In a Gondola." "The Grammarian's Funeral" gives also
an aspect of Renaissance life--the fervor for learning characteristic
of the earlier days of the Renaissance when devoted pedants, as Arthur
Symons says in referring to this poem, broke ground in the restoration
to the modern world of the civilization and learning of ancient Greece
and Rome. Again, "The Heretic's Tragedy" and "Holy-Cross Day" picture
most vividly the methods resorted to by the dying church in its attempts
to keep control of the souls of a humanity seething toward religious
tolerance.

With only a small space at command, it is difficult to decide on the
poems to be touched upon, especially where there is not one but would
repay prolonged attention, due no less to the romantic interest of the
stories, the marvellous penetration into human motives, the grasp of
historical atmospheres, than to the originality and perfection of their
artistry.

A word must be said of "The Flight of the Duchess" and "Childe Roland
to the Dark Tower Came," both poems which have been productive of many
commentaries, and both holding their own amid the bray [sic] of critics
as unique and