What right had a lounger up their lane? 
        But, by creeping very close,
      With the good wall’s help,—­their eyes might strain
        And stretch themselves to Oes,

      VIII.

      Yet never catch her and me together,
        As she left the attic, there,
      By the rim of the bottle labelled ‘Ether,’
        And stole from stair to stair,

      IX.

      And stood by the rose-wreathed gate.  Alas,
        We loved, sir,—­used to meet: 
      How sad and bad and mad it was—­
        But then, how it was sweet!”

A Likeness forms a third, and a good third, to these two fine and subtle studies of modern English life.  It is one of those poems which, because they seem simple and superficial, and can be galloped off the tongue in a racing jingle, we are apt to underrate or overlook.  Yet it would be difficult to find a more vivid bit of genre painting than the three-panelled picture in this single frame.

The three blank verse poems which complete the series of purely dramatic pieces, A Death in the Desert, Caliban upon Setebos and Mr. Sludge, “The Medium" are more elaborate than any yet named.  They follow, to a considerable extent, the form of the blank verse monologues which are the glory of Men and Women.  Alike in their qualities and defects they represent a further step in development.  The next step will lead to the elaborate and extended monologues which comprise the greater part of Browning’s later works.

A Death in the Desert is an argument in a dramatic frame-work.  The situation imaged is that of the mysterious death of St. John in extreme old age.  The background to the last utterance of the apostle is painted with marvellous brilliance and tenderness:  every circumstance is conceived and represented in that pictorial style, in which a word is equal to a touch of the brush of a great painter.  But, delicately as the circumstances and surroundings are indicated, it is as an argument that the poem is mainly left to exist.  The bearing of this argument on contemporary theories may to some appear a merit, to others a blemish.  To make the dying John refute Strauss or Renan, handling their propositions with admirable dialectical skill, is certainly, on the face of it, somewhat hazardous.  But I can see no real incongruity in imputing to the seer of Patmos a prophetic insight into the future, no real inconsequence in imagining the opponent of Cerinthus spending his last breath in the defence of Christian truth against a foreseen scepticism.  In style, the poem a little recalls Cleon; with less of harmonious grace and clear classic outline, it possesses a certain stilled sweetness, a meditative tenderness, all its own, and certainly appropriate to the utterance of the “beloved disciple.”