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 English qualities of cultured gladness and repose, which Browning so seldom presented, but which are perfectly rendered here: 

    The wooded watered country, hill and dale
    And steel-bright thread of stream, a-smoke with mist,
    A-sparkle with May morning, diamond drift
    O’ the sun-touched dew.

We must feel that life goes on with leisurely happiness outside the little room that isolates its tragic occupants; the smoke from fires of turf and wood is in the air; cottagers are at their morning cookery.  After all the poet of the inn album was well inspired in his eloquent address:—­“Hail, calm acclivity, salubrious spot!” and only certain incidents, which time will soon efface, have touched the salutation with irony.

In this poem Browning reverts to his earlier method of clearly and simply dividing the evil from the good.  We are not embarrassed by the mingling of truth with sophistry; our instinctive sympathies are not held in check, but are on the contrary reinforced by the undisguised sympathies of the writer.  We are no more in doubt where wrong and where justice lie than if Count Gismond were confronting Count Gauthier.  The avenger, indeed, is no champion of romance; he is only a young English snob, a little slow of brain, a little unrefined in manner, a “clumsy giant handsome creature,” who for a year has tried to acquire under an accomplished tutor the lore of cynical worldliness, and has not succeeded, for he is manly and honest, and has the gentleness of strength; “for ability, all’s in the rough yet.”  Of his education the best part is that he has once loved and been thwarted in his love.  And now in a careless-earnest regard for his cousin his need is that of occupation for his big, idle boy’s heart; he wants something to do, someone also to serve.  Browning wishes to show the passion of righteousness, which suddenly flames forth and abolishes an evil thing as springing from no peculiar knightly virtue but from mere honest human nature.  The huge boy, somewhat crude, somewhat awkward, with a moral temper still unclarified, has enough of our good, common humanity in him to hold no parley with utter wickedness, when once he fully apprehends its nature; therefore he springs upon it in one swift transport of rage and there and then makes an end of it.  His big red hands are as much the instruments of divine justice as is the axe of Ivan Ivanovitch.