A Forgiveness is a drama of this world.  It is the legitimate successor of the monologues of Men and Women; it may, indeed, be most precisely compared with an earlier monologue, My Last Duchess; and it is, like these, the concentrated essence of a complete tragedy.  Like all the best of Browning’s poems, it is thrown into a striking situation, and developed from this central point.  It is the story of a love merged in contempt, quenched in hate, and rekindled in a fatal forgiveness, told in confession to a monk by the man whom the monk has wronged.  The personage who speaks is one of the most sharply-outlined characters in Browning:  a clear, cold, strong-willed man, implacable in love or hate.  He tells his story in a quiet, measured, utterly unemotional manner, with reflective interruptions and explanations, the acute analysis of a merciless intellect; leading gradually up to a crisis only to be matched by the very finest crises in Browning:—­

                                      “Immersed
      In thought so deeply, Father?  Sad, perhaps? 
      For whose sake, hers or mine or his who wraps
      —­Still plain I seem to see!—­about his head
      The idle cloak,—­about his heart (instead
      Of cuirass) some fond hope he may elude
      My vengeance in the cloister’s solitude? 
      Hardly, I think!  As little helped his brow
      The cloak then, Father—­as your grate helps now!”

The poem is by far the greatest thing in the volume; it is, indeed, one of the very finest examples of Browning’s psychological subtlety and concentrated dramatic power.[52]

The ballad of Herve Riel which has no rival but Tennyson’s Revenge among modern sea-ballads, was written at Croisic, 30th September 1867, and was published in the Cornhill Magazine for March, 1871 in, order that the L100 which had been offered for it might be sent to the Paris Relief Fund.  It may be named, with the “Ride from Ghent to Aix,” as a proof of how simply and graphically Browning can write if he likes; how promptly he can stir the blood and thrill the heart.  The facts of the story, telling how, after the battle of the Hogue, a simple Croisic sailor saved all that was left of the French fleet by guiding the vessels into the harbour, are given in the Croisic guide-books; and Browning has followed them in everything but the very effective end:—­

      “’Since ’tis ask and have, I may—­
          Since the others go ashore—­
      Come!  A good whole holiday! 
          Leave to go and see my wife, whom I call the Belle Aurore!’
      That he asked and that he got,—­nothing more.”

“Ce brave homme,” says the account, “ne demanda pour recompense d’un service aussi signale, qu’un conge absolu pour rejoindre sa femme, qu’il nomma la Belle Aurore.”

Cenciaja, the only blank verse piece in the volume, is of the nature of a note or appendix to Shelley’s “superb achievement” The Cenci.  It serves to explain the allusion to the case of Paolo Santa Croce (Cenci, Act V. sc. iv.).  Browning obtained the facts from a MS. volume of memorials of Italian crime, in the possession of Sir John Simeon, who published it in the series of the Philobiblon Society.[53]