Like the smoke Pillared o'er Sodom, when day broke-- I saw Him.

One magnific pall Mantled in massive fold and fall His head, and coiled in snaky swathes About His feet; night's black, that bathes All else, broke, grizzled with despair, Against the soul of blackness there.
A gesture told the mood within-- That wrapped right hand which based the chin,-- That intense meditation fixed On His procedure,--pity mixed With the fulfilment of decree.
Motionless thus, He spoke to me, Who fell before His feet, a mass, No man now.
The picture of the final conflagration of the Judgment Day is perhaps over-laboured, a descriptive _tour de force_, horror piled upon horror with accumulative power,--a picture somewhat too much in the manner of Martin; and the verse does not lend itself to the sustained sublimity of terror.

The glow of Milton's hell is intenser, and Milton's majestic instrumentation alone could render the voices of its flames.

The real awfulness of Browning's Judgment Day dwells wholly in the inner experiences of a solitary soul.

The speaker finds of a sudden that the doom is upon him, and that in the probation of life his choice was earth, not heaven.