"PROTUS" is a fragment of an imaginary chronicle: recording in the same
page and under the head of the same year, how the child-Emperor, Protus,
descended from a god, was growing in beauty and in grace, worshipped by
the four quarters of the known world; and how John, the Pannonian
blacksmith's bastard, came and took the Empire; but, as "some think,"
let Protus live--to be heard of later as dependent in a foreign court;
or perhaps to become the monk, whom rumour speaks of as bearing his
name, and who died at an advanced age in Thrace.

A fit comment on this Empire lost and won, is supplied by two busts,
also imaginary, one showing a "rough hammered" coarse-jawed head; the
other, a baby face, crowned with a wreath of violets.


"APPARENT FAILURE" is Mr. Browning's verdict on three drowned men, whose
bodies he saw exposed at the Morgue[103] in Paris, in the summer of
1856. He justly assumes that the death was suicide; and as he reads in
each face its special story of struggle and disappointment,

"Poor men, God made, and all for that!" (vol. vii. p. 247)

the conviction lays hold of him that their doom is not final, that the
life God blessed in the beginning cannot end accursed of Him; that even
a despair and a death like these, record only a seeming failure.

The poem was professedly written to save the memory of the Morgue, then
about to be destroyed.