oo, that his punishment is his due. He has acted without
pausing to consider, and he is called on to pay the penalty of "evil
wrought by want of thought."

The character of Mildred, a woman "more sinned against than sinning," is
exquisitely and tenderly drawn. We see her, and we see and feel

"The good and tender heart,
Its girl's trust and its woman's constancy,
How pure yet passionate, how calm yet kind,
How grave yet joyous, how reserved yet free
As light where friends are"--

as her brother, in a memorable passage, describes her. She is so
thrillingly alive, so beautiful and individual, so pathetic and pitiful
in her desolation. Every word she speaks comes straight from her heart
to ours. "I know nothing that is so affecting," wrote Dickens in a
letter to Forster, "nothing in any book I have ever read, as Mildred's
recurrence to that 'I was so young--had no mother.' I know no love like
it, no passion like it, no moulding of a splendid thing after its
conception like it."[22] Not till Pompilia do we find so pathetic a
portrait of a woman.

In Thorold, Earl Tresham, we have an admirable picture of the head of a
great house, proud above all things of the honour of the family and its
yet stainless 'scutcheon, and proud, with a deep brotherly tenderness of
his sister Mildred: a strong and fine nature, one whom men instinctively
cite as "the perfect spirit of honour." Mertoun, the apparent hero of
the play, is a much less prominent and masterly figure than Tresham, not
so much from any lack of skill in his delineation, as from the essential
ineffectualness of his nature. Guendolen Tresham, the Beatrice of the
play (her lover Austin is certainly no Benedick) is one of the most
pleasantly humorous characters in Browning. Her gay, light-hearted talk
brightens the sombre action like a gleam of sunlight. And like her
prototype, she is a true woman. As Beatrice stands by the calumniated
Hero, so Guendolen stands by Mildred, and by her quick woman's heart and
wit, her instinct of things, sees and seizes the missing clue, though
too late, as it proves, to avert the impending disaster.

The play contains one of Browning's most delicate and musical lyrics,
the serenade beginning, "There's a woman like a dew-drop." This is the
first of the love-songs in long lines which Browning wrote so often at
the end of his life, and so seldom earlier.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 21: A contemporary ac