"Ay, still my fragments wander, music-fraught, Sighs of the soul, mine once, mine now, and mine For ever! Crumbled arch, crushed aqueduct, Alive with tremors in the shaggy growth Of wild-wood, crevice-sown, that triumphs there, Imparting exultation to the hills." [Footnote 57: _Letters of E.B.B._, ii. 385.] But if he had abandoned these generous dreams, he had won free trade and given the multitude cheap bread, and in a highly ingenious piece of sophistry he explains, by the aid of the gospel of Evolution, how men are united by their common hunger, and thrust apart by their conflicting ideas. But Hohenstiel knows very well that his intrenchments are not unassailable; and he goes on to compose an imaginary biography of himself as he might have been, with comments which reflect his actual course. The finest part of this æthereal voyage is that in which his higher unfulfilled self pours scorn upon the paltry duplicities of the "Peace" policy by which his actual and lower self had kept on good terms abroad, and beguiled the imperious thirst for "la gloire" at home. Indignantly the author of _Hervé Riel_ asks why "the more than all magnetic race" should have to court its rivals by buying their goods untaxed, or guard against them by war for war's sake, when Mother Earth has no pride above her pride in that same "race all flame and air And aspiration to the boundless Great, The incommensurably Beautiful-- Whose very falterings groundward come of flight Urged by a pinion all too passionate For heaven and what it holds of gloom and glow." _The Ring and the Book_ had made Browning famous. But fame was far from tempting him to undue compliance with the tastes of his new-won public; rather it prompted him to indulge his genius more freely, and to go his own way with a more complete security and unconcern. _Hohenstiel-Schwangau_--one of the rockiest and least attractive of all Browning's poems--had mystified most of its readers and been little relished by the rest. And now that plea for a discredited politician was followed up by what, on the face of it, was, as Mrs Orr puts it, "a defence of inconstancy in marriage." The apologist for Napoleon III. came forward as the advocate of Don Juan. The prefixed bit of dialogue from Molière's play explains the situation. Juan, detected by his wife in an intrigue, is completely nonplussed. "Fie!" cries Elvire, mockingly (in Browning's happy paraphrase),-- "Fie! for a man of mode, accustomed at the court To such a style of thing, how awkwardly my lord Attempts defence!"