That brave Frascati-villa with its bath,
       So, let the blue lump poise between my knees,
       Like God the Father’s globe on both his hands
       Ye worship in the Jesu Church so gay,
       For Gandolf shall not choose but see and burst! 
       Swift as a weaver’s shuttle fleet our years: 
       Man goeth to the grave, and where is he? 
       Did I say basalt for my slab, sons?  Black—­
       ’Twas ever antique-black I meant!  How else
       Shall ye contrast my frieze to come beneath? 
       The bas-relief in bronze ye promised me,
       Those Pans and Nymphs ye wot of, and perchance
       Some tripod, thyrsus, with a vase or so,
       The Saviour at his sermon on the mount,
       Saint Praxed in a glory, and one Pan
       Ready to twitch the Nymph’s last garment off,
       And Moses with the tables ... but I know
       Ye mark me not!  What do they whisper thee,
       Child of my bowels, Anselm?  Ah, ye hope
       To revel down my villas while I gasp
       Bricked o’er with beggar’s mouldy travertine,
       Which Gandolf from his tomb-top chuckles at! 
       Nay, boys, ye love me—­all of jasper, then! 
       ’Tis jasper ye stand pledged to, lest I grieve
       My bath must needs be left behind, alas! 
       One block, pure green as a pistachio-nut,
       There’s plenty jasper somewhere in the world—­
       And have I not Saint Praxed’s ear to pray
       Horses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts,
       And mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs? 
       —­That’s if ye carve my epitaph aright,
       Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully’s every word,
       No gaudy ware like Gandolf’s second line—­
       Tully, my masters?  Ulpian serves his need.’

“I know no other piece of modern English prose or poetry in which there is so much told, as in these lines, of the Renaissance spirit,—­its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin.  It is nearly all that I have said of the central Renaissance in thirty pages of the Stones of Venice, put into as many lines, Browning’s also being the antecedent work."[24]

This poem is the third of the iambic monologues, and, but for Artemis Prologizes, the first in blank verse.  I am not aware if it was written much later than Pictor Ignotus, but it belongs to a later manner.  Scarcely at his very best, scarcely in the very greatest monologues of the central series of Men and Women, or in these only, has Browning written a finer or a more characteristic poem.  As a study in human nature it has all the concentrated truth, all the biting and imaginative realism, of a scene from Balzac’s Comedie Humaine:  it is as much a fact and a creation.  It is, moreover, as Ruskin has told us, typical not only of a single individual but of a whole epoch; while, as a piece of metrical writing, it has all the originality of an innovation.  If Browning can scarcely be said to have created this species of blank verse, half familiar, vivid with natural life, full of vigour and beauty, rising and falling, with the unerring motion of the sea, he has certainly adapted, perfected, and made it a new thing in his hands.