way and perhaps has evaded the probation of life; the man who chooses passion rather than duty has slipped and stumbled, but his was the harder course and perhaps the better.  Which of the two was sinner? which was saint?  To be impeccable may be the most damning of offences.  In St Martin’s Summer the eerie presence of ghosts of dead loves, haunting a love that has grown upon the graves of the past, is a check upon passion, which by a sudden turn at the close triumphs in a victory that is defeat. Fears and Scruples is a confession of the trials of theistic faith in a world from which God seems to be an absentee.  What had been supposed to be letters from our friend are proved forgeries; what we called his loving actions are the accumulated results of the natural law of heredity.  Yet even if theism had to be abandoned, it would have borne fruit: 

    All my days I’ll go 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.