“And what is this that rises propped, With pillars of prodigious girth? Is it really on the earth, This miraculous Dome of God? Has the angel’s measuring-rod Which numbered cubits, gem from gem, ’Twixt the gates of the New Jerusalem, Meted it out,--and what he meted, Have the sons of men completed? --Binding, ever as he bade, Columns in the colonnade, With arms wide open to embrace The entry of the human race ...” But even in this instance, Browning, before his description is finished, cannot content himself with mere abstract statements of beauty divorced from human life. He turns to the builders--the people, and to the purpose--service to humanity. In the only poem of Browning which deals with an architect at all, (_Old Pictures in Florence_, in which Giotto is considered at some length), the discussion is from the standpoint of the architect’s aim, his partial achievement, and the relation his work, when it is finally finished, will have to the people of his city; not from the standpoint of any technical interest in the art. V. ARCHITECTURE AND PERSONALITY.--With all his mention of Italian works of architecture, then, Browning’s primary object was never the abstract beauty of that art itself. He has far less treatment of it, from an abstract standpoint, than many another English writer who has scarcely gone outside his native land for material. A building, as a building! What was there in it related to personality as that expressed itself in the struggles of the soul? And, therefore, what could there be in it to concern Robert Browning? CHAPTER VI ITALIAN PAINTING IN THE POEMS OF BROWNING.