the softlier, sadlier
For that dream's sake! How forget the thrill
Through and through me as I thought "The gladlier
Lives my friend because I love him still?"

And the friend will value love all the more which persists through the
obstacles of partial ignorance.[118] The blank verse monologue _A
Forgiveness_, Browning's "Spanish Tragedy," is a romance of passion,
subtle in its psychology, tragic in its action. Out of its darkness
gleams especially one resplendent passage--the description of those
weapons of Eastern workmanship--

Horror coquetting with voluptuousness--

one of which is the instrument chosen by the husband's hatred, now
replacing his contempt, to confer on his wife a death that is
voluptuous. The grim-grotesque incident from the history of the Jews in
Italy related in _Filippo Baldinucci_ recalls the comedy and the pathos
of _Holy Cross Day_, to which it is in every respect inferior. The Jew
of the centuries of Christian persecution is for Browning's imagination
a being half-sublime and half-grotesque, and wholly human. _Cenciaja_, a
note in verse connected with Shelley's _Cenci_, would be excellent as a
note in prose appended to the tragedy, explaining, as it does, why the
Pope, inclining to pardon Beatrice, was turned aside from his purposes
of mercy; it rather loses than gains in value by having been thrown into
verse. To recover our loyalty to Browning as a poet, which this volume
sometimes puts to the test, we might well reserve _Numpholeptos_ for the
close. The pure and disempassioned in womanly form is brought face to
face with the passionate and sullied lover, to whom her charm is a
tyranny; she is no warm sun but a white moon rising above this lost
Endymion, who never slumbers but goes forth on hopeless quests at the
bidding of his mistress, and wins for all his reward the "sad, slow,
silver smile," which is now pity, now disdain, and never love. The
subjugating power of chaste and beautiful superiority to passion over
this mere mortal devotee is absolute and inexorable. Is the nymph an
abstraction and incarnation of something that may be found in womanhood?
Is she an embodiment of the Ideal, which sends out many questers, and
pities and disdains them when they return soiled and defeated? Soft and
sweet as she appears, she is _La belle Dame sans merci_, and her
worshipper is as desperately lost as the knight-at-arms of Keats's poem.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 112: See Mor