in the presence of which all hesitation vanished,—­nay, thought itself fell back before the tide of revealing emotion:—­

     “I paced the city:  it was the first Spring. 
      By the invasion I lay passive to,
      In rushed new things, the old were rapt away;
      Alike abolished—­the imprisonment
      Of the outside air, the inside weight o’ the world
      That pulled me down.”

The bonds of his old existence snapped, the former heaven and earth died for him, and that death was the beginning of life:—­

        “Death meant, to spurn the ground. 
      Soar to the sky,—­die well and you do that. 
      The very immolation made the bliss;
      Death was the heart of life, and all the harm
      My folly had crouched to avoid, now proved a veil
      Hiding all gain my wisdom strove to grasp: 
      As if the intense centre of the flame
      Should turn a heaven to that devoted fly
      Which hitherto, sophist alike and sage,
      Saint Thomas with his sober grey goose-quill,
      And sinner Plato by Cephisian reed,
      Would fain, pretending just the insect’s good,
      Whisk off, drive back, consign to shade again. 
      Into another state, under new rule
      I knew myself was passing swift and sure;
      Whereof the initiatory pang approached,
      Felicitous annoy, as bitter-sweet
      As when the virgin-band, the victors chaste,
      Feel at the end the earthly garments drop,
      And rise with something of a rosy shame
      Into immortal nakedness:  so I
      Lay, and let come the proper throe would thrill
      Into the ecstasy and outthrob pain.”

But he presently discovered that his new task did not contravene, but only completed, the old ideal.  The Church had offered her priest no alternative between the world and the cloister,—­self-indulgence and self-slaughter.  For ignoble passion her sole remedy was to crush passion altogether.  She calls to the priest to renounce the fleshly woman and cleave to Her, the Bride who took his plighted troth; but it is a scrannel voice sighing from stone lungs:—­

     “Leave that live passion, come, be dead with me!”

From the exalted Pisgah of his “new state” he recognised that the true self-sacrifice, the perfect priesthood, lay by way of life, not death, that life and death

     “Are means to an end, that passion uses both,
      Indisputably mistress of the man
      Whose form of worship is self-sacrifice.”

Yet it is not this recognition, but the “passion” which ultimately determines his course.  Love is, for Browning, in his maturity, deeper and more secure than thought; Caponsacchi wavers in his thinking, falls back upon the narrower conception of priesthood, persuades himself that his duty is to serve God:—­

     “Duty to God is duty to her:  I think
      God, who created her, will save her too
      Some new way, by one miracle the more,
      Without me.”