Take, for example, "The Statue and the Bust," which many have considered to uphold an immoral standard and of which its defenders declare that the moral point of the story lies not in the fact that the lady and the Duke wished to elope with each other but that they never had strength enough of mind to do so. Considering what an entirely conventional and loveless marriage this of the lady and the Duke evidently was we cannot suppose, in the light of Browning's solution of similar situations, that he would have thought it any great crime if the Duke and the lady had eloped, since there was so genuine an attraction between them. But he does word his climax, it must be confessed, in a way to leave a loophole of doubt on the subject for those who do not like to be scandalized by their Browning: "Let a man contend to the uttermost for his life's set prize, be it what it will!" There is a saving grace to be extracted from the last line. "--The sin I impute to each frustrate ghost Is--the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin, Though the end in sight was a vice, I say." In "The Ring and the Book," the problem is similar to that in the "Inn Album," except that the villain in the case is the lawful husband. The lover, Caponsacchi, under different conditions demanding that he shall not give the slightest expression to his love, rises to a reverential height which even some of Browning's readers seem to doubt as possible. Caponsacchi is, however, too much under the spell of Catholic theology to see the mystical meaning of the love which he acknowledges in his own soul for Pompilia. In this poem it is Pompilia who is given the divine vision. If I may resay what I have said in another connection,[3] there is no moral struggle in Pompilia's short life such as that in Caponsacchi's. Both were alike in the fact that up to a certain point in their lives their full consciousness was unawakened: hers slept, through innocence and ignorance; his, in spite of knowledge, through lack of aspiration. She was rudely awakened by suffering; he by the sudden revelation of a possible ideal. Therefore, while for him, conscious of his past failures, a struggle begins: for her, conscious of no failure in her duty, which she had always followed according to her light, there simply continues duty according to the new light. Neither archbishop nor friendly "smiles and shakes of head" could weaken her conviction that, being estranged in soul from her husband, her attitude toward him was inevitable. No qualms of conscience troubled her as to her inalienable right to fly from him. That she submitted as long as she did was only because no one could be found to aid her. And how quick and certain her defence of Caponsacchi, threatened by Guido, when he overtakes them at the Inn! As she thinks over it calmly afterward, she makes no apology, but justifies her action as the voice of God.