“In the piazza of the SS.  Annunziata at Florence is an equestrian statue of the Grand Duke Ferdinand the First, representing him as riding away from the church, with his head turned in the direction of the Riccardi [now Antinori] Palace, which occupies one corner of the square.  Tradition asserts that he loved a lady whom her husband’s jealousy kept a prisoner there; and that he avenged his love by placing himself in effigy where his glance could always dwell upon her."[33]

In the poem the lovers agree to fly together, but the flight, postponed for ever, never comes to pass.  Browning characteristically blames them for their sin of “the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin,” for their vacillating purpose, their failure in attaining “their life’s set end,” whatever that end might be.  Despite the difficulty of the metre, the verse is singularly fresh and musical.  In this poem, the first in which Browning has used the terza rima, he observes, with only occasional licence, the proper pause at the end of each stanza of three lines.  This law, though rarely neglected by Dante, has seldom been observed by the few English poets who have attempted the measure.  Neither Byron in the Prophecy of Dante, nor Shelley in The Triumph of Life, nor Mrs. Browning in Casa Guidi Windows, has done so.  In Browning’s later poems in this metre, the pause, as if of set purpose, is wholly disregarded.

How it strikes a Contemporary is at once a dramatic monologue and a piece of poetic criticism.  Under the Spanish dress, and beneath the humorous treatment, it is easy to see a very distinct, suggestive and individual theory of poetry, and in the poet who “took such cognizance of men and things, ...

      “Of all thought, said and acted, then went home
      And wrote it fully to our Lord the King—­”

we have, making full allowance for the imaginary dramatic circumstances, a very good likeness of a poet of Browning’s order.  Another poem, “Transcendentalism,” is a slighter piece of humorous criticism, possibly self-criticism, addressed to one who “speaks” his thoughts instead of “singing” them.  Both have a penetrating quality of beauty in familiarity.

Before and After, which mean before and after the duel, realise between them a single and striking situation. Before is spoken by a friend of the wronged man; After by the wronged man himself.  The latter is not excelled by any poem of Browning’s in its terrible conciseness, the intensity of its utterance of stifled passion.

      “AFTER.

      “Take the cloak from his face, and at first
        Let the corpse do its worst!

      “How he lies in his rights of a man! 
        Death has done all death can. 
      And, absorbed in the new life he leads,
        He recks not, he heeds
      Nor his wrong nor my vengeance; both strike
        On his senses alike,
      And are lost in the solemn and strange
        Surprise of the change.