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 sulphur offends his nostrils.  And the rage of piety is hotter than the fire; it is a mingled passion, compounded of delight in the fierce spectacle, a thrilling ecstacy at the sight of a fellow-creature tortured, the self-complacency of conscious orthodoxy, and the horrible zeal of the Lord’s house.  Yet though the event is sung by one of the rejoicing orthodox, somehow we are made to feel that when John the apostate, bound in the flames and gagged, prays to Jesus Christ to save him, that prayer may have been answered.  This passage from the story of the age of faith was not selected with a view to please the mediaeval revivalists of the nineteenth century, but in truth its chief value is not theological or historical but artistic. Holy Cross Day, a second fragment from history, does not fall from the sublime to the ridiculous but rises from the ridiculous to the sublime.  The picture of the close-packed Jews tumbling or sidling churchwards to hear the Christian sermon (for He saith “Compel them to come in”) and to partake of heavenly grace has in it something of Rembrandt united with something of Callot.  Such a crew of devout impostors is at once comic and piteous.  But while they are cared for in the merciful bowels of the Church, and groan out the expected compunction, their ancient piety is not extinct; their hearts burn in them with the memory of Jacob’s House and of Jerusalem.  Christ at least was of their kindred, and if they wronged Him in past time, they will not wrong Him now by naming these who outrage and insult them after His name.

The historical distortions of the religion of Christ do not, however, disturb the faith of Browning in the Christian revelation of Divine love.  In Cleon he exhibits the failure of Paganism, even in its forms of highest culture, to solve the riddle of life and to answer the requirements of the human spirit.  All that regal power liberally and wisely used can confer belongs to Protus in his Tyranny; all that genius, and learning and art can confer is the possession