the collection, are the five blank verse pieces, Andrea del Sarto, Fra Lippo Lippi, Cleon, Karshish, and Bishop Blougram.  Each is a masterpiece of poetry.  Each is in itself a drama, and contains the essence of a life, condensed into a single episode, or indicated in a combination of discourse, conversation, argument, soliloquy, reminiscence.  Each, besides being the presentation of a character, moves in a certain atmosphere of its own, philosophical, ethical, or artistic. Andrea del Sarto and Fra Lippo Lippi deal with art. Cleon and Karshish, in a sense companion poems, are concerned, each secondarily, with the arts and physical sciences, primarily with the attitude of the Western and Eastern worlds when confronted with the problem of the Gospel of Christ. Bishop Blougram is modern, ecclesiastical and argumentative.  But however different in form and spirit, however diverse in milieu, each is alike the record of a typical soul at a typical moment.

Andrea del Sarto is a “translation into song” of the picture known as “Andrea del Sarto and his Wife,” in the Pitti Palace at Florence.  The story of Andrea del Sarto is told by Vasari, in one of the best known of his Lives:  how the painter, who at one time seemed as if he might have competed with Raphael, was ruined, as artist and as man, by his beautiful, soulless wife, the fatal Lucrezia del Fede; and how, led and lured by her, he outraged his conscience, lowered his ideal, and, losing all heart and hope, sank into the cold correctness, the unerring fluency, the uniform, melancholy repetition of a single type, his wife’s, which distinguish his later works.  Browning has taken his facts from Vasari, and he has taken them quite literally.  But what a change, what a transformation and transfiguration!  Instead of a piece of prose biography and criticism, we have (in Mr. Swinburne’s appropriate words) “the whole man raised up and reclothed with flesh.”  No more absolutely creative work has been done in our days; few more beautiful and pathetic poems written.  The mood of sad, wistful, hopeless mournfulness of resignation which the poem expresses, is a somewhat rare one with Browning’s vivid and vivacious genius.  It is an autumn twilight piece.

      “A common greyness silvers everything,—­
      All in a twilight, you and I alike
      —­You, at the point of your first pride in me
      (That’s gone, you know),—­but I, at every point;
      My youth, my hope, my art, being all toned down
      To yonder sober pleasant Fiesole. 
      There’s the bell clinking from the chapel top;
      That length of convent-wall across the way
      Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside;
      The last monk leaves the garden; days decrease,
      And autumn grows, autumn in everything. 
      Eh, the whole seems to fall into a shape
      As if I saw alike my work and self
      And all that I was born to be and do,
      A twilight-piece.”