Akin to The Tomb at St. Praxed’s on its dramatic, though dissimilar on its lyric, side, is the picturesque and terrible little poem of The Laboratory[25] in which a Brinvilliers of the Ancien Regime is represented buying poison for her rival; one of the very finest examples of Browning’s unique power of compressing and concentrating intense emotion into a few pregnant words, each of which has its own visible gesture and audible intonation.

It is in such poems that Browning is at his best, nor is he perhaps anywhere so inimitable.  The second poem under the general heading of “France and Spain,” The Confessional, in which a girl, half-maddened by remorse and impotent rage, tells how a false priest induced her to betray the political secrets of her lover, is, though vivid and effective, not nearly so powerful and penetrating as its companion piece. Time’s Revenges may perhaps be classified with these utterances of individual passion, though in form it is more closely connected with the poems I shall touch on next.  It is a bitter and affecting little poem, not unlike some of the poems written many years afterwards by a remarkable and unfortunate poet,[26] who knew, in his own experience, something of what Browning happily rendered by the instinct of the dramatist only.  It is a powerful and literal rendering of a certain sordid and tragic aspect of life, and is infused with that peculiar grim humour, the laugh that chokes in a sob, which comes to men when mere lamentation is a thing foregone.

The octosyllabic couplets of Time’s Revenges, as well as its similarly realistic treatment and striking simplicity of verse and phrase, connect it with the admirable little poem now know as The Italian in England.[27] This is a tale of an Italian patriot, who, after an unsuccessful rising, has taken refuge in England.  It tells of his escape and of how he was saved from the Austrian pursuers by the tact and fidelity of a young peasant woman.  Its chief charm lies in the simplicity and sincere directness of its telling. The Englishman in Italy, a poem of very different class, written in brisk and vigorous anapaests, is a vivid and humorous picture of Italian country life.  It is delightfully gay and charming and picturesque, and is the most entirely descriptive poem ever written by Browning.  In The Glove we have a new version, from an original and characteristic standpoint, of the familiar old story known to all in its metrical version by Leigh Hunt, and more curtly rhymed (without any very great impressiveness) by Schiller.  Browning has shown elsewhere that he can tell a simple anecdote simply, but he has here seized upon the tale of the glove, not for the purpose of telling over again what Leigh Hunt had so charmingly and sufficiently told, but in order to present the old story in a new light, to show how the lady might have been right and the knight wrong, in spite of King Francis’s verdict and