and the nicely balanced indifferentism of men emasculate, blank of belief, who play with the realities of life, is set forth with its superior foolishness of wisdom.  The advocacy which consists of professional self-display is exhibited genially, humorously, an advocacy horn-eyed to the truth of its own case, to every truth, indeed, save one—­that which commends the advocate himself, his ingenious wit, and his flowers of rhetoric.  The criminal is allowed his due portion of veracity and his fragment of truth—­“What shall a man give for his life?” He has enough truth to enable him to fold a cloud across the light, to wrench away the sign-posts and reverse their pointing hands, to remove the land-marks, to set up false signal fires upon the rocks.  And then are heard three successive voices, each of which, and each in a different way, brings to our mind the words, “But there is a spirit in man; and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding.”  First the voice of the pure passion of manhood, which is naked and unashamed; a voice terrible in its sincerity, absolute in its abandonment to truth, prophet-like in its carelessness of personal consequences, its carelessness of all except the deliverance of a message—­and yet withal a courtly voice, and, if it please, ironical.  It is as if Elihu the son of Barachel stood up and his wrath were kindled:  “Behold my belly is as wine which hath no vent; it is ready to burst like new bottles.  I will speak that I may be refreshed.”  And yet we dare not say that Caponsacchi’s truth is the whole truth; he speaks like a man newly converted, still astonished by the supernatural light, and inaccessible to many things visible in the light of common day.  Next, a voice from one who is human indeed “to the red-ripe of the heart,” but who is already withdrawn from all the turbulence and turbidity of life; the voice of a woman who is still a child; of a mother who is still virginal; of primitive instinct, which comes from God, and spiritual desire kindled by that saintly knighthood that had saved her; a voice from the edge of the world, where the dawn of another world has begun to tremble and grow luminous,—­uttering its fragment of the truth.  Last, the voice of old age, and authority and matured experience, and divine illumination, old age encompassed by much doubt and weariness and human infirmity, a solemn, pondering voice, which, with God somewhere in the clear-obscure, goes sounding on a dim and perilous way, until in a moment this voice of the anxious explorer for truth changes to the voice of the unalterable justicer, the armed doomsman of righteousness.

Truth absolute is not attained by any one of the speakers; that, Browning would say, is the concern of God.  And so, at the close, we are directed to take to heart the lesson

     That our human speech is naught,
    Our human testimony false, our fame
    And human estimation words and wind.