The day came.  The cousins arrived.  Miranda did not appear.  He had broken down at the funeral in a fresh outburst of frenzied grief; but from this he had had time to recover.  Someone peeped into his room.  There he stood, by a blazing fire, a small empty coffer by his side, engaged in reading some letters which he had taken from it.  Whose they were, and what the reading had told him, was quickly shown.  He replaced them in the box, plunged this in the fire; and reiterating the words, “Burn, burn and purify my past!” held it there till both his hands had been consumed; no sign of pain escaping him.  He was dragged away by main force, protesting against this hindrance to his salvation.  “He was not yet purified.  SHE was not yet burned out of him.”  In his bed he raved and struggled against the image which again rose before his eyes, which again grew and formed itself in his flesh.

The delirium was followed by three months of exhaustion.  The moment the sick man could “totter” out of his room, he found his way to her whom he had abjured, and who was in Paris calmly awaiting his return to her.  She came back with him.  He introduced her to his kinsmen.  “It was all right,” he said; “Clara would henceforth be—­his brother; he would still fulfil his bond.”  From this, however, he departed, in so far as not to content himself with a pittance.  He sold his business to the “cousinry,” and, as they considered, on hard terms.  He and Clara then returned to Clairvaux.

And now, as Mr. Browning interprets the situation, his experience had entered on a new phase.  He had tested the equal strength of the earthly and the heavenly powers, and he knew that he could elude neither, and that neither could be postponed to the other.  He no longer strove to compromise between these opposing realities, but threw his whole being into the struggle to unite them.  He adhered to his unlawful love.  His acts of piety and charity became grotesque in their excessiveness. (Of these again particulars are given.) Two years went by; and then, one April morning, Miranda climbed his Belvedere, and was found, soon after, dead, on the turf below.  There seemed no question of accident.  The third attempt at suicide had succeeded.

On this fact, however, Mr. Browning puts a construction of his own.  He asserts the poet’s privilege of seeing into the man’s mind; and makes him think before us in a long and impassioned soliloquy, which sets forth the hidden motive of his deed.  As Mr. Browning conceives him, he did not mean to kill himself.  He did so in a final, irresistible impulse to manifest his faith, and to test the foundations of it.  It has had for its object, not the spiritual truths of Christianity, but its miraculous powers; and these powers have of late been symbolized to his mind by the Virgin of the Ravissante.[79] The conflict of despotisms has thus been waged between the natural woman and the supernatural:  each a monarch in her way.  As he looks from his tower towards the Church of the Ravissante, he apostrophizes her who is enthroned there.