The heretic of "THE HERETIC'S TRAGEDY" was Jacques du Bourg-Molay, last
Grand Master of the Order of Knights Templars, and against whom
preposterous accusations had been brought. This "Jacques," whom the
speaker erroneously calls "John," and who might stand for any victim of
middle-age fanaticism, was burned in Paris in 1314; and the "Interlude,"
we are told, "would seem to be a reminiscence of this event, as
distorted by two centuries of refraction from Flemish brain to brain."
The scene is carried on by one singer, in a succession of verses, and by
a chorus which takes up the last and most significant words of each
verse; the organ accompanying in a plagal cadence,[85] which completes
its effect. The chant is preceded by an admonition from the abbot, which
lays down its text: that God is unchanging, and His justice as infinite
as His mercy; and singer and chorus both denounce the impious heresy of
"John:" who admitted only the love, and sinned the "Unknown Sin," in his
confidence in it. How the logs are fired; how the victim roasts; amidst
what hideous and fantastic torments the damned soul "flares forth into
the dark" is quaintly and powerfully described.


ROMANTIC POEMS.

The prevalence of thought in Mr. Browning's poetry has created in many
minds an impression that he is more a thinker than a poet: that his
poems not only are each inspired by some leading idea, but have grown up
in subservience to it; and those who hold this view both do him
injustice as a poet, and underrate, however unconsciously, the
intellectual value of what his work conveys. For in a poet's
imagination, the thought and the thing--the idea and its image--grow up