Thus far the imaginary speaker so resembles Mr. Browning himself, that we forget for the moment that we are not dealing with him; and his vicarious testimony to the value of human life lands him, at page 145, in a personal protest against the folly which under cover of poetry seeks to run it down.  He lashes out against the “bard” who can rave about inanimate nature as something greater than man; and who talks of the “unutterable” impressions conveyed by the ocean, as greater than the intelligence and sympathy, the definite thoughts and feelings which can be uttered.  The lines from “Childe Harold” which will be satirized in “Fifine at the Fair” are clearly haunting him here.  But we shall now pass on to more historic ground.

It is a natural result of these opinions that Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau regards life as the one boon which contains every other; and that the material prosperity of his people has been the first object by which his “sustaining” policy was inspired.  He does not deny that even within the limits thus imposed, some choice of cause or system seemed open to him.  “It seemed open to him to choose between religion and free-thought, between monarchy and government by the people:  and to throw his energies entirely into one scale or the other, instead of weighting one and the other by turns.  It could justly have been urged that the simpler aim is included in the more complex, and that he would promote the interests of his subjects by serving them from the wider, rather than from the narrower point of view.”

“But what is true in theory is not always so in practice.  He has loved a cause, and believed in it—­the cause of united Italy; and so long as he was free to express sympathy with this—­so long, his critics say, as he was a mere voice, with air to float in, and no obstacle to bar his way—­he expressed it from the bottom of his soul.  But with the power to act—­with the firm ground wheron to act—­came also the responsibilities of action:  the circumstance by which it must be controlled.  He saw the wants of his people; the eyes which craved light alone, and the mouths which craved only bread.  He felt that the ideal must yield to the real, the remote to what was near; and the work of Italian deliverance remained incomplete.  It was his very devotion to the one principle which brought the reproach of vacillation upon him.”

“He broke faith with his people too”—­so his critics continue—­“for he supplied food to their bodies; but withheld the promised liberties of speech and writing which would have brought nourishment to their souls.”

And again he answers that he gave them what they wanted most.  He gave them that which would enable them to acquire freedom of soul, and without which such freedom would have been useless.