But his failure is beautiful and pathetic, and for a time at least his Virgin, Babe, and Saint will smile from the cloister wall with their "cold, calm, beautiful regard." And yet to have done otherwise to have been other than this; to have striven like that youth--the Urbinate--men praise so! More remarkable, as the summary of a civilisation, than _My Last Duchess_, is the address of the worldling Bishop, who lies dying, to the "nephews" who are sons of his loins.

In its Paganism of Christianity--which lacks all the manly virtue of genuine Paganism--that portion of the artistic Renaissance which leans towards the world and the flesh is concentrated and is given as in quintessential form.

The feeble fingers yet cling to the vanities of earth; the speaker babbles not of green fields but of his blue lump of lapis-lazuli; and the last word of all is alive only with senile luxury and the malice of perishing recollection.
FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 30: _In a Balcony_, published in _Men and Women_, 1855, is said to have been written two years previously at the Baths of Lucca.] [Footnote 31: I had written the above--and I leave it as I wrote it--before I noticed the following quoted from the letter of a friend by Mrs Arthur Bronson in her article Browning in Venice: "Browning seemed as full of dramatic interest in reading 'In a Balcony' as if he had just written it for our benefit.

One who sat near him said that it was a natural sequence that the step of the guard should be heard coming to take Norbert to his doom, as, with a nature like the queen's, who had known only one hour of joy in her sterile life, vengeance swift and terrible would follow on the sudden destruction of her happiness.

'Now I don't quite think that,' answered Browning, as if he were following out the play as a spectator.