“Greek art had its lesson to teach, and it taught it.  It reasserted the dignity of the human form.  It re-stated the truth of the soul which informs the body, and the body which expresses it.  Men saw in its creations their own qualities carried to perfection, and were content to know that such perfection was possible, and to renounce the hope of attaining it.  In this experience the first stage was progress; the second was stagnation.  Progress began again, when men looked on these images of themselves and said:  “we are not inferior to these.  We are greater than they.  For what has come to perfection perishes, and we are imperfect because eternity is before us; because we were made to grow.”  The soul which has eternity within its grasp cannot express itself in a single glance; nor can its consciousness be petrified into an unchanging sorrow or joy.  The painters who set aside Greek art undertook to vindicate the activity of the soul.  They made its hopes and fears shine through the flesh, though the flesh they shone through were frayed and torn by the process.  This was the work which they had to do; and which remains undone, while men speak of them as “Old Master” this, and “Early” the other, and do not dream that “Old” and “New” are fellows:  “that all are links in the chain of the one progressive art life; the one spiritual revelation.”

The speaker now relapses into the playful mood which his more serious reflections have scarcely interrupted.  He thinks of the removable paintings which lie hidden in cloister or church, and which a sympathizing purchaser might rescue from decay; and he reproaches those melancholy ghosts for not guiding such purchasers to them.  He, for instance, does not aspire to the works of the very great; but a number of lesser lights, whose name and quality he recites, might, he thinks, have lent themselves to the fulfilment of his artistic desires;[64] and he declares himself particularly hurt by the conduct of his old friend Giotto, who has allowed some picture he had been hunting through every church in Florence to fall into other hands.  He concludes with an invocation to a future time when the Grand Duke will have been pitched across the Alps, when art and the Republic will revive together, and when Giotto’s Campanile will be completed—­which glorious consummation, though he may not live to see, he considers himself the first to predict.

Mr. Browning alludes, in the course of this monologue, to the two opposite theories of human probation:  one confining it to this life, the other extending it through a series of future existences; and without pronouncing on their relative truth, he owns himself in sympathy with the former.  He is tired and likes to think of rest.  The sentiment is, however, not in harmony with his general views, and belongs to the dramatic aspect of the poem.[65]