“So, die my pictures! surely, gently die! 
        O youth, men praise so,—­holds their praise its worth? 
      Blown harshly, keeps the trump its golden cry? 
        Tastes sweet the water with such specks of earth?”

The monotonous “linked sweetness long drawn out” of the verses, the admirably arranged pause, recurrence and relapse of the lines, render the sense and substance of the subject with singular appropriateness. The Tomb at St. Praxed’s (now known as The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church), has been finally praised by Ruskin, and the whole passage may be here quoted:—­

“Robert Browning is unerring in every sentence he writes of the Middle Ages; always vital, right, and profound; so that in the matter of art, with which we have been specially concerned, there is hardly a principle connected with the mediaeval temper that he has not struck upon in those seemingly careless and too rugged lines of his.

                  “’As here I lie
       In this state-chamber, dying by degrees,
       Hours and long hours in the dead night, I ask
       “Do I live, am I dead?” Peace, peace seems all. 
       Saint Praxed’s ever was the church for peace;
       And so, about this tomb of mine.  I fought
       With tooth and nail to save my niche, ye know: 
       —­Old Gandolf cozened me, despite my care;
       Shrewd was that snatch from out the corner South
       He graced his carrion with, God curse the same! 
       Yet still my niche is not so cramped but thence
       One sees the pulpit o’ the epistle-side,
       And somewhat of the choir, those silent seats. 
       And up into the aery dome where live
       The angels, and a sunbeam’s sure to lurk: 
       And I shall fill my slab of basalt there,
       And ’neath my tabernacle take my rest,
       With those nine columns round me, two and two,
       The odd one at my feet where Anselm stands: 
       Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe
       As fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulse. 
       —­Old Gandolf with his paltry onion-stone,
       Put me where I may look at him!  True peach,
       Rosy and flawless:  how I earned the prize! 
       Draw close:  that conflagration of my church
       —­What then?  So much was saved if aught were missed! 
       My sons, ye would not be my death?  Go dig
       The white-grape vineyard where the oil-press stood,
       Drop water gently till the surface sink,
       And if ye find ...  Ah God, I know not, I!... 
       Bedded in store of rotten fig-leaves soft,
       And corded up in a tight olive-frail,
       Some lump, ah God, of lapis lazuli,
       Big as a Jew’s head cut off at the nape,
       Blue as a vein o’er the Madonna’s breast.... 
       Sons, all have I bequeathed you, villas, all,