. . ."

There she is, as Browning might have shown her! "Control's not for this
lady," Tresham adds--the sign-manual of a Browning woman. As I have
said, he can display this lovely type through others, can sing it in his
own person, as in the exquisite dewdrop lyric; but once let her speak
for herself--he obeys the world and its appraisals, and the truth
departs from him; we have the Mildred Tresham of the theatre, of "the
partner of my guilty love," of "Oh, Thorold, you must never tempt me
thus!" of (in a later scene) "I think I might have urged some little
point in my defence to Thorold"; of that last worst unreality of all,
when Thorold has told her of his murder of her lover, and she cries:

". . . I--forgive not,
But bless you, Thorold, from my soul of souls!
There! Do not think too much upon the past!
The cloud that's broke was all the same a cloud
While it stood up between my friend and you;
You hurt him 'neath its shadow: but is that
So past retrieve? I have his heart, you know;
I may dispose of it: I give it you!
It loves you as mine loves!"

True, she is to die, and so is to rejoin her lover; but, thus rejoined,
will "blots upon the 'scutcheon" seem to them the all-sufficient claim
for Thorold's deed--Thorold who dies with these words on his lips:

". . . You hold our 'scutcheon up.
Austin, no blot on it! You see how blood
Must wash one blot away; the first blot came
And the first blood came. To the vain world's eye
All's gules again: no care to the vain world
From whence the red was drawn!"

And on Austin's cry that "no blot shall come!" he answers:

"I said that: yet it did come. Should it come,
Vengeance is God's, not man's. Remember me!"

_Vengeance_: how do they who are met again in the spirit-world regard
that word, that "God"?

FOOTNOTES:

[90:1] Berdoe. _Browning Cyclopaedia._

IV

BALAUSTION

IN "BALAUSTION'S ADVENTURE" AND "ARISTOPHANES' APOLOGY"

To me, Balaustion is the queen of Browning's women--nay, I am tempted to
proclaim her queen of every poet's women. For in her meet all
lovelinesses, and to make her dearer still, some are as yet but in germ
(what a mother she will be, for example); so that we have, with all the
other beauties, the sense of the unfolding rose--"enmisted by the scent
it makes," in a phrase of her creator's which, though in the actua