The moral is just, and the story bears it well. Yet Browning's own conviction that man's highest and clearest faith is no more than a shadow of the unattainable truth may for a moment give us pause. An iconoclast, even such an iconoclast as Voltaire, is ordinarily a man of unqualified faith in the conclusions of the intellect. If our best conceptions of things divine be but a kind of parable, why quarrel with the parables accepted by other minds than our own? The answer is twofold. First Browning was not a sceptic with respect to the truths attained through love, and he held that mankind had already attained through love truths that condemned the religion of self-torture and terrified propitiations, which led Léonce Miranda to reduce his right hand and his left to carbonised stumps and dragged him kneeling along the country roads to manifest his devotion to the image of the Virgin. Secondly he held that our education through intellectual illusions is a progressive education, and that to seek to live in an obsolete illusion is treason against humanity. Therefore his exhortation is justified by his logic: Quick conclude Removal, time effects so tardily, Of what is plain obstruction; rubbish cleared, Let partial-ruin stand while ruin may, And serve world's use, since use is manifold. The tower which once served as a belfry may possibly be still of use to some Father Secchi to "tick Venus off in transit"; only never bring bell again to the partial-ruin, To damage him aloft, brain us below, When new vibrations bury both in brick. For which sane word, if not for all the pages of his poem, we may feel gratefully towards the writer. It is the word of Browning the moralist. The study of the double-minded hero belongs to Browning the psychologist. The admirable portrait of Clara, the successful adventuress, harlot and favoured daughter of the Church, is the chief gift received through this poem from Browning the artist. She is a very admirable specimen of her kind--the _mamestra brassicae_ species of caterpillar, and having with beautiful aplomb outmanoeuvred and flouted the rapacious cousinry, Clara is seen at the last, under the protection of Holy Church, still quietly devouring her Miranda leaf--such is the irony of nature, and the merit of a perfect digestive apparatus.