they knew they could not bear.  These men are common at a period when life is racing rapidly through the veins of a vivid city like Florence.  The general intensity of the life lifts them to a height they would never reach in a dull and sleepy age.  The life they have is not their own, but the life of the whole town.  And this keen perception of life outside of them persuades them that they can do all that men of real power can do.  In reality, they can do nothing and make nothing worth a people’s honour.  Browning, who himself was compact of boldness, who loved experiment in what was new, and who shaped what he conceived without caring for criticism, felt for these men, of whom he must have met many; and, asking himself “How they would think; what they would do; and how life would seem to them,” wrote this poem.  In what way will poor human nature excuse itself for failure?  How will the weakness in the man try to prove that it was power?  How, having lost the joy of life, will he attempt to show that his loss is gain, his failure a success; and, being rejected of the world, approve himself within?

This was a subject to please Browning; meat such as his soul loved:  a nice, involved, Daedalian, labyrinthine sort of thing, a mixture of real sentiment and self-deceit; and he surrounded it with his pity for its human weakness.

“I could have painted any picture that I pleased,” cries this painter; “represented on the face any passion, any virtue.”  If he could he would have done it, or tried it.  Genius cannot hold itself in.

“I have dreamed of sending forth some picture which should enchant the world (and he alludes to Cimabue’s picture)—­

    “Bound for some great state,
    Or glad aspiring little burgh, it went—­
    Flowers cast upon the car which bore the freight,
    Through old streets named afresh from the event.

“That would have been, had I willed it.  But mixed with the praisers there would have been cold, critical faces; judges who would press on me and mock.  And I—­I could not bear it.”  Alas! had he had genius, no fear would have stayed his hand, no judgment of the world delayed his work.  What stays a river breaking from its fountain-head?

So he sank back, saying the world was not worthy of his labours.  “What?  Expose my noble work (things he had conceived but not done) to the prate and pettiness of the common buyers who hang it on their walls!  No, I will rather paint the same monotonous round of Virgin, Child, and Saints in the quiet church, in the sanctuary’s gloom.  No merchant then will traffic in my heart.  My pictures will moulder and die.  Let them die.  I have not vulgarised myself or them.”  Brilliant and nobly wrought as the first three poems are of which I have written, this quiet little piece needed and received a finer workmanship, and was more difficult than they.