and ashes!' So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold.
Dear dead women, with such hair, too--what's become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old."

After all, the pageant of life has value! We need not _only_ the wise
men. And even the wise man creeps through every nerve when he listens to
that music. "Here's all the good it brings!"

+ + + + +

None the less, there is trouble other than that of its passing in this
pageant. Itself has the seed of death within it. All that beauty,
riches, ease, can do, shall leave some souls unsatisfied--nay, shall
kill some souls. . . . This too Browning could perceive and show; and
once more, loved to show in the person of a girl. There is something in
true womanhood which transcends all _morgue_: it seems almost his foible
to say that, so often does he say it! In Colombe, in the Queen of _In a
Balcony_ (so wondrously contrasted with Constance, scarcely less noble,
yet half-corroded by this very rust of state and semblance); above all,
in the exquisite imagining of that "Duchess," the girl-wife who twice is
given us, and in two widely different environments--yet is (to my
feeling) _one_ loved incarnation of eager sweetness. He touched her
first to life when she was dead, if one may speak so paradoxically;
then, unsatisfied with that posthumous awaking, brought her resolutely
back to earth--in _My Last Duchess_ and _The Flight of the Duchess_
respectively. Let us examine the two poems, and I think we shall agree,
in reading the second, that Browning, like Caponsacchi, could not have
the lady dead.

First, then, comes a picture--the mere portrait, "painted on the wall,"
of a dead Italian girl.

"That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf's hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will 't please you sit and look at her? I said
Fra Pandolf by design: for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus."

The Duke, a Duke of Ferrara, owner of "a nine-hundred-years-old name,"
is showing