one who captures any fragment of
reality captures also undesignedly and inevitably its divine
significance.[68]

The same doctrine which is applied to art in _Old Pictures in Florence_,
that high aims, though unattained, are of more worth than a lower
achievement, is applied, and with a fine lyrical enthusiasm, to the
pursuit of knowledge in _A Grammarian's Funeral_. The time is "shortly
after the Revival of Learning in Europe"; the place--

a tall mountain, citied to the top,
Crowded with culture!--

is imagined to suit the idea of the poem. The dead scholar, borne to the
summit for burial on the shoulders of his disciples, had been possessed
by the aspiration of Paracelsus--to know; and, unlike Paracelsus, he had
never sought on earth both to know and to enjoy. He has been the saint
and the martyr of Renaissance philology. For the genius of such a writer
as the author of _Hudibras_, with his positive intellect and dense
common sense, there could hardly have been found a fitter object for
mockery than this remorseless and indefatigable pedant. Browning,
through the singing voices of the dead master's disciples, exalts him to
an eminence of honour and splendid fame. To a scholar Greek particles
may serve as the fittest test of virtue; this glorious pedant has
postponed life and the enjoyments of life to future cycles of existence;
here on earth he expends a desperate passion--upon what? Upon the
dryasdust intricacies of grammar; and it is not as though he had already
attained; he only desperately follows after:

That low man seeks a little thing to do,
Sees it and does it:
This high man, with a great thing to pursue,
Dies ere he knows it.

But again the grammarian, like the painter, does not strive after a
vague, transcendental ideal; he is not as one that beateth the air; his
quest for knowledge is definite and positive enough; he throws all care
for infinite things, except the infinite of philological accuracy, upon
God; and the viaticum of his last moments is one more point of grammar.

Two of the poems of _Men and Women_ are pages tragic-grotesque and
pathetic-grotesque from the history of religion. In _The Heretic s
Tragedy_ John, Master of the Temple, burns alive in Paris square for his
sins against the faith and Holy Church; the glow of the blazing larch
and pine almost reaches the reader of the stanzas; the great petals of
this red rose of flame bend towards him; the gust of su