He cheats; yes, but he also apprehends a truth which the world is blind to.  Or, after all, is this cheating when every lie is quick with a germ of truth?  Is not such lying as this a self-desecration, if you will; but still more a strange, sweet self-sacrifice in the service of truth?  At the lowest is it not required by the very conditions of our poor mortal life, which remains so sorry a thing, so imperfect, so unendurable until it is brought into fruitful connection with a future existence?  This world of ours is a cruel, blundering, unintelligible world; but let it be pervaded by an influx from the next world, how quickly it rights itself! how intelligible it all grows!  And is the faculty of imagination, the faculty which discovers the things of the spirit—­put to his own uses by the poet and even the historian—­is this a power which cheats its possessor, or cheats those for whose advantage he gives it play?

Browning’s design is to exhibit even in this Sludge the rudiments—­coarse, perverted, abnormally directed and ineffective for moral good—­of that sublime spiritual wisdom, which, turned to its proper ends and aided by the highest intellectual powers, is present—­to take a lofty exemplar—­in his Pope of The Ring and the Book.  It is not through spiritualism so-called that Sludge has received his little grain of truth; that has only darkened the glimmer of true light which was in him.  Yet liar and cheat and coward, he is saved from a purely phantasmal existence by this fibre of reality which was part of his original structure.  The epilogue—­Sludge’s outbreak against his corrupter and tormentor—­stands as evidence of the fact that no purifying, no cleansing, no really illuminating power remains in what is now only a putrescent luminosity within him.  His rage is natural and dramatically true; a noble rage would be to his honour.  This is a base and poisonous passion with no virtue in it, and the passion, flaring for a moment, sinks idly into as base a fingering of Sludge’s disgraceful gains.

[Illustration:  THE VIA BOCCA DI LEONE, ROME, IN WHICH THE BROWNINGS STAYED.

From a photograph.]

The summer and early autumn of 1853 were spent by Browning and his wife, as they had spent the same season four years previously, at the Baths of Lucca.  Their house among the hills was shut in by a row of plane-trees in which by day the cicale were shrill; at evening fireflies lit up their garden.  The green rushing river—­“a flashing scimitar that cuts through the mountain”—­the chestnut woods, the sheep-walks, “the villages on the peaks of the mountains like wild eagles,” renewed their former delights.