y were to meet in the same house a week later,
to arrange in what manner that sinful woman should be acquainted with
the facts.

The day came. The cousins arrived. Miranda did not appear. He had broken
down at the funeral in a fresh outburst of frenzied grief; but from this
he had had time to recover. Someone peeped into his room. There he
stood, by a blazing fire, a small empty coffer by his side, engaged in
reading some letters which he had taken from it. Whose they were, and
what the reading had told him, was quickly shown. He replaced them in
the box, plunged this in the fire; and reiterating the words, "Burn,
burn and purify my past!" held it there till both his hands had been
consumed; no sign of pain escaping him. He was dragged away by main
force, protesting against this hindrance to his salvation. "He was not
yet purified. SHE was not yet burned out of him." In his bed he raved
and struggled against the image which again rose before his eyes, which
again grew and formed itself in his flesh.

The delirium was followed by three months of exhaustion. The moment the
sick man could "totter" out of his room, he found his way to her whom he
had abjured, and who was in Paris calmly awaiting his return to her. She
came back with him. He introduced her to his kinsmen. "It was all
right," he said; "Clara would henceforth be--his brother; he would still
fulfil his bond." From this, however, he departed, in so far as not to
content himself with a pittance. He sold his business to the "cousinry,"
and, as they considered, on hard terms. He and Clara then returned to
Clairvaux.

And now, as Mr. Browning interprets the situation, his experience had
entered on a new phase. He had tested the equal strength of the earthly
and the heavenly powers, and he knew that he could elude neither, and
that neither could be postponed to the other. He no longer strove to
compromise between these opposing realities, but threw his whole being
into the struggle to unite them. He adhered to his unlawful love. His
acts of piety and charity became grotesque in their excessiveness. (Of
these again particulars are given.) Two years went by; and then, one
April morning, Miranda climbed his Belvedere, and was found, soon after,
dead, on the turf below. There seemed no question of accident. The third
attempt at suicide had succeeded.

On this fact, however, Mr. Browning puts a construction of his own. He
asserts the poet's privilege of seeing into th