Read it through once

-- 1. Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity!: “The Bishop on his death-bed has reached Solomon’s conclusion that ‘all is vanity’. So he proceeds to specify his particular vanity in the choice of a tombstone.” --N. Brit. Rev. 34, p. 367. “In ‘The Palace of Art’, Mr. Tennyson has shown the despair and isolation of a soul surrounded by all luxuries of beauty, and living in and for them; but in the end the soul is redeemed and converted to the simple humanities of earth. Mr. Browning has shown that such a sense of isolation and such despair are by no means inevitable; there is a death in life which consists in tranquil satisfaction, a calm pride in the soul’s dwelling among the world’s gathered treasures of stateliness and beauty. . . . So the unbelieving and worldly spirit of the dying Bishop, who orders his tomb at Saint Praxed’s, his sense of the vanity of the world simply because the world is passing out of his reach, the regretful memory of the pleasures of his youth, the envious spite towards Gandolf, who robbed him of the best position for a tomb, and the dread lest his reputed sons should play him false and fail to carry out his designs, are united with a perfect appreciation of Renaissance art, and a luxurious satisfaction, which even a death-bed cannot destroy, in the splendor of voluptuous form and color.” --Edward Dowden.