When he again comes on the scene, the charm is partly broken.  But withal the play is one of remarkable vigour and beauty.  It seems to me that too much has been written against it on the score of its metrical rudeness.  The lines are beat out by a hammer, but in the process they are wrought clear of all needless alloy.  To urge, as has been lately urged, that it lacks all human touch and is a mere intellectual fanfaronade, and that there is not once a line of poignant insight, is altogether uncritical.  Readers of this mind must have forgotten or be indifferent to those lines, for example, where the wretched Charles stammeringly excuses himself to his loyal minister for his death-warrant, crying out that it was wrung from him, and begging Strafford not to curse him:  or, again, that wonderfully significant line, so full of a too tardy knowledge and of concentrated scorn, where Strafford first begs the king to “be good to his children,” and then, with a contempt that is almost sublime, implores, “Stay, sir, do not promise, do not swear!” The whole of the second scene in the fifth act is pure genius.  The reader, or spectator, knows by this time that all hope is over:  that Strafford, though all unaware, is betrayed and undone.  It is a subtle dramatic ruse, that of Browning’s representing him sitting in his apartment in the Tower with his young children, William and Anne, blithely singing.

Can one read and ever forget the lines giving the gay Italian rhyme, with the boy’s picturesquely childish prose-accompaniment?  Strafford is seated, weary and distraught:—­

“O bell’andare
Per barca in mare,
Verso la sera
Di Primavera!

William.  The boat’s in the broad moonlight all this while—­

Verso la sera
Di Primavera!

And the boat shoots from underneath the moon
Into the shadowy distance; only still
You hear the dipping oar—­

Verso la sera,

And faint, and fainter, and then all’s quite gone,
Music and light and all, like a lost star.

Anne.  But you should sleep, father:  you were to sleep.

Strafford.  I do sleep, Anne; or if not—­you must know
                  There’s such a thing as ...

William.  You’re too tired to sleep.

Strafford.  It will come by-and-by and all day long,
                  In that old quiet house I told you of: 
                  We sleep safe there.

Anne.  Why not in Ireland?

Strafford.  No! 
                  Too many dreams!—­”

To me this children’s-song and the fleeting and now plaintive echo of it, as “Voices from Within”—­“Verso la sera, Di Primavera”—­in the terrible scene where Strafford learns his doom, is only to be paralleled by the song of Mariana in “Measure for Measure,” wherein, likewise, is abduced in one thrilling poignant strain the quintessential part of the tense life of the whole play.