of sculpturing single situations is seldom shown in finer relief than in those poems in which he has seized upon some “occult eccentricity of history” or of legend, like this of The Heretic’s Tragedy, or that in Holy-Cross Day, fashioning it into some quaint, curt, tragi-comic form. Holy-Cross Day expresses the feelings of the Jews, who were forced on this day (the 14th September) to attend an annual Christian sermon in Rome.  A deliciously naive extract from an imaginary Diary by the Bishop’s Secretary, 1600, first sets forth the orthodox view of the case; then the poem tells us “what the Jews really said.”  Nothing more audaciously or more sardonically mirthful was ever written than the first part of this poem, with its

      “Fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak! 
      Blessedest Thursday’s the fat of the week;”

while the sudden transition to the sublime and steadfast Song of Death of Rabbi ben Ezra is an effect worthy of Heine:  more than worthy.  Heine would inevitably have put his tongue in his cheek again at the end.

With the three great mediaeval poems should be named the slighter sketch of Protus.  The first and last lines, describing two imaginary busts, are a fine instance of Browning’s power of translating sense into sound.  Compare the smooth and sweet melody of the opening lines—­

“Among these latter busts we count by scores
Half-emperors and quarter-emperors,

* * * * *

One loves a baby-face, with violets there—­
Violets instead of laurels in the hair,—­
As they were all the little locks could bear”—­

with the rasping vigour and strength of sound which point the contrast of the conclusion:—­

“Here’s John the Smith’s rough-hammered head.  Great eye,
Gross jaw and griped lips do what granite can
To give you the crown-grasper.  What a man!”

One poem of absolutely unique order is the romance of “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.”  If it were not for certain lines, certain metaphors and images, here and there in his earlier works, we should find in this poem an exception to the rule of Browning’s work so singular and startling as to be almost phenomenal.  But in passages of Pauline, of Paracelsus, of the lyric written in 1836, and incorporated, more than twenty years later, with James Lee’s Wife, we have distinct evidence of a certain reserve, as it were, of romantic sensibility, a certain tendency, which we may consider to have been consciously checked rather than early exhausted, towards the weird and fanciful.  In Childe Roland all this latent sensibility receives full and final expression.  The poem is very generally supposed to be an allegory, and a number of ingenious interpretations have been suggested, and the “Dark Tower” has been defined as Love, Life, Death and Truth.  But, as a matter of fact, Browning, in writing it, had no