And the friend will value love all the more which persists through the obstacles of partial ignorance.[118] The blank verse monologue _A Forgiveness_, Browning's "Spanish Tragedy," is a romance of passion, subtle in its psychology, tragic in its action. Out of its darkness gleams especially one resplendent passage--the description of those weapons of Eastern workmanship-- Horror coquetting with voluptuousness-- one of which is the instrument chosen by the husband's hatred, now replacing his contempt, to confer on his wife a death that is voluptuous. The grim-grotesque incident from the history of the Jews in Italy related in _Filippo Baldinucci_ recalls the comedy and the pathos of _Holy Cross Day_, to which it is in every respect inferior. The Jew of the centuries of Christian persecution is for Browning's imagination a being half-sublime and half-grotesque, and wholly human. _Cenciaja_, a note in verse connected with Shelley's _Cenci_, would be excellent as a note in prose appended to the tragedy, explaining, as it does, why the Pope, inclining to pardon Beatrice, was turned aside from his purposes of mercy; it rather loses than gains in value by having been thrown into verse. To recover our loyalty to Browning as a poet, which this volume sometimes puts to the test, we might well reserve _Numpholeptos_ for the close. The pure and disempassioned in womanly form is brought face to face with the passionate and sullied lover, to whom her charm is a tyranny; she is no warm sun but a white moon rising above this lost Endymion, who never slumbers but goes forth on hopeless quests at the bidding of his mistress, and wins for all his reward the "sad, slow, silver smile," which is now pity, now disdain, and never love. The subjugating power of chaste and beautiful superiority to passion over this mere mortal devotee is absolute and inexorable. Is the nymph an abstraction and incarnation of something that may be found in womanhood? Is she an embodiment of the Ideal, which sends out many questers, and pities and disdains them when they return soiled and defeated? Soft and sweet as she appears, she is _La belle Dame sans merci_, and her worshipper is as desperately lost as the knight-at-arms of Keats's poem. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 112: See Morley's "Life of Gladstone," vol. iii. p. 417.] [Footnote 113: Pages 46, 47 of the first edition.] [Footnote 114: Pages 58-60.] [Footnote 115: It may here be noted that Dante Rossetti in a morbid mood supposed that certain passages of _Fifine_ were directed against himself; and so ceased his friendship with Browning.] [Footnote 116: Fanny Kemble also derived from the story of Lord De Ros the subject of her "English Tragedy."] [Footnote 117: Some sentences in what follows are taken from a notice of the volume which I wrote on its appearance for _The Academy_.] [Footnote 118: See Browning's letter to Mr Kingsland in "Robert Browning" by W. G. Kingsland (1890), pp. 32, 33.] Chapter XV