the pages of his poem, we may feel
gratefully towards the writer. It is the word of Browning the moralist.
The study of the double-minded hero belongs to Browning the
psychologist. The admirable portrait of Clara, the successful
adventuress, harlot and favoured daughter of the Church, is the chief
gift received through this poem from Browning the artist. She is a very
admirable specimen of her kind--the _mamestra brassicae_ species of
caterpillar, and having with beautiful aplomb outmanoeuvred and flouted
the rapacious cousinry, Clara is seen at the last, under the protection
of Holy Church, still quietly devouring her Miranda leaf--such is the
irony of nature, and the merit of a perfect digestive apparatus.

The second narrative poem of this period, _The Inn Album_ (1875), is in
truth a short series of dramatic scenes, placed in a narrative
frame-work. It is as concentrated as _Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_ is
diffuse; and the unities of time and place assist the tragic
concentration. A recast of _The Inn Album_ might indeed have appeared as
a drama on the Elizabethan stage side by side with such a brief
masterpiece, piteous and terrible, as "A Yorkshire Tragedy"; it moves
with a like appalling rapidity towards the climax and the catastrophe.
The incident of the attempted barter of a discarded mistress to clear
off the score of a gambling debt is derived from the scandalous
chronicle of English nineteenth century society.[116] Browning's tale of
crime was styled on its appearance by a distinguished critic of
Elizabethan drama the story of a "penny dreadful." He was right; but he
should have added that some of the most impressive and elevated pieces
of our dramatic literature have had sources of no greater dignity. The
story of the "penny dreadful" is here rehandled and becomes a tragedy of
which the material part is only a translation into external deed of a
tragedy of the soul. The _dramatis personae_, as refashioned from the
crude fact and the central passions of the poem, were such as would
naturally call forth what was characteristic in Browning's genius. A
martyr of love, a traitor to love, an avenger of love,--these are the
central figures. The girlish innocence of the cousin is needed only as a
ray of morning sunlight to relieve the eye that is strained and pained
by the darkness and the pallor of the faces of the exponents of passion.
And a like effect is produced by the glimpses of landscape, rich in the
Engl