The story of Miranda the Paris jeweller and his mistress, Clara de Millefleurs, satisfied this condition sufficiently. Time had not mellowed the raw crudity of this "splotch," which Browning found recorded in no old, square, yellow vellum book, but in the French newspapers of that very August; the final judgment of the court at Caen ("Vire") being actually pronounced while he wrote. The poet followed on the heels of the journalist, and borrowed, it must be owned, not a little of his methods. If any poem of Browning's may be compared to versified special correspondence, it is this. He tells the story, in his own person, in blank verse of admirable ease and fluency, from which every pretence of poetry is usually remote. What was it in this rather sordid tale that arrested him? Clearly the strangely mingled character of Miranda. Castile and Paris contend in his blood; and his love adventures, begun on the boulevards and in their spirit, end in an ecstasy of fantastic devotion. His sins are commonplace and prosaic enough, but his repentances detach him altogether from the herd of ordinary penitents as well as of ordinary sinners--confused and violent gesticulations of a visionary ascetic struggling to liberate himself from the bonds of his own impurity. "The heart was wise according to its lights"; but the head was incapable of shaping this vague heart-wisdom into coherent practice. A parallel piece of analysis presents Clara as a finished artist in life--a Meissonier of limited but flawless perfection in her unerring selection of means to ends. In other words, this not very attractive pair struck Browning as another example of his familiar contrast between those who "try the low thing and leave it done," and those who aim higher and fail. Yet it must be owned that these Browningesque ideas are not thoroughly wrought into the substance of the poem; they are rather a sort of marginal embroidery woven on to a story which, as a whole, has neither been shaped by Browning's hand nor vitalised with his breath. Neither Clara nor Miranda can be compared in dramatic force with his great creations; even Clara's harangue to the Cousinry, with all its passion and flashing scorn, is true rather to her generic character as the injured champion of her dead lord than to her individual variety of it--the woman of subtle, inflexible, yet calculating devotion. Miranda's soliloquy before he throws himself from the Tower is a powerful piece of construction, but, when the book is closed, what we seem to see in it is not the fantastical goldsmith surveying the motives of his life, but Browning filling in the bizarre outlines of his construction with appropriate psychological detail. Another symptom of decline in Browning's most characteristic kind of power is probably to be found in the play of symbolism which invests with an air of allegorical abstraction the "Tower" and the "Turf," and makes the whole poem, with all its prosaic realism, intelligibly