I knew myself was passing swift and sure;
Whereof the initiatory pang approached,
Felicitous annoy, as bitter-sweet
As when the virgin-band, the victors chaste,
Feel at the end the earthly garments drop,
And rise with something of a rosy shame
Into immortal nakedness: so I
Lay, and let come the proper throe would thrill
Into the ecstasy and outthrob pain."

But he presently discovered that his new task did not contravene, but
only completed, the old ideal. The Church had offered her priest no
alternative between the world and the cloister,--self-indulgence and
self-slaughter. For ignoble passion her sole remedy was to crush passion
altogether. She calls to the priest to renounce the fleshly woman and
cleave to Her, the Bride who took his plighted troth; but it is a
scrannel voice sighing from stone lungs:--

"Leave that live passion, come, be dead with me!"

From the exalted Pisgah of his "new state" he recognised that the true
self-sacrifice, the perfect priesthood, lay by way of life, not death,
that life and death

"Are means to an end, that passion uses both,
Indisputably mistress of the man
Whose form of worship is self-sacrifice."

Yet it is not this recognition, but the "passion" which ultimately
determines his course. Love is, for Browning, in his maturity, deeper