Quenched lay their cauldron, cowered i’ the dust the crew,
      As, in a glory of armour like Saint George,
      Out again sprang the young good beauteous priest
      Bearing away the lady in his arms
      Saved for a splendid minute and no more."[52]

[Footnote 49:  Cf.  II.  Corkran, Celebrities and I (R.  Browning, senior), 1903.]

[Footnote 50:  It is perhaps not without significance that in the summer sojourn when The Ring and the Book was planned, Euripides was, apart from that, his absorbing companion.  “I have got on,” he writes to Miss Blagden, “by having a great read at Euripides,—­the one book I brought with me.”]

[Footnote 51:  Ring and the Book, i. 437.]

[Footnote 52:  Ring and the Book, i. 580-588.]

Such a vision might have been rendered without change in the chiselled gold and agate of the Idylls of the King.  But Browning’s hero could be no Sir Galahad; he had to be something less; and also something more.  The idealism of his nature had to force its way through perplexities and errors, beguiled by the distractions and baffled by the duties of his chosen career.  Born to be a lover, in Dante’s great way, he had groped through life without the vision of Beatrice, seeking to satisfy his blind desire, as perhaps Dante after Beatrice’s death did also, with the lower love and scorning the loveless asceticism of the monk.  The Church encouraged its priest to be “a fribble and a coxcomb”; and a fribble and a coxcomb, by his own confession, Caponsacchi became.  But the vanities he mingled with never quite blinded him.  He walked in the garden of the Hesperides bent on great adventure, plucked in ignorance hedge-fruit and feasted to satiety, but yet he scorned the achievement, laughing at such high fame for hips and haws.[53] Then suddenly flashed upon him the apparition, in the theatre, of

     “A lady, young, tall, beautiful, strange and sad.”

[Footnote 53:  Caponsacchi, 1002 f.]

The gaze burnt to his soul, and the beautiful, sad, strange smile haunted him night and day; but their first effect was to crush and scatter all thoughts of love.  The young priest found himself haunting the solemn shades of the Duomo instead of serenading countesses; vowed to write no more canzonets, and doubted much whether Marini were a better poet than Dante after all.  His patron jocularly charged him with playing truant in Church all day long:—­

     “‘Are you turning Molinist?’ I answered quick: 
      ‘Sir, what if I turned Christian?  It might be.’”

The forged love-letters he instantly sees through.  They are the scorpion—­blotch feigned to issue miraculously from Madonna’s mouth.  And then Pompilia makes her appeal.  “Take me to Rome!” The Madonna has turned her face upon him indeed, “to summon me and signify her choice,” and he at once receives and accepts

        “my own fact, my miracle
      Self-authorised and self-explained,”