and the aged queen whom he has so successfully served has secretly
dreamed all the time, though already wedded, of being his. For a
brilliant young minister to fail to make love to his sovereign, in spite
of her grey hairs and the marriage law, is a kind of high treason. In
its social presuppositions this community belongs to a world as
visionary as the mystic dream-politics of M. Maeterlinck. But, those
presuppositions granted, everything in it has the uncompromising
clearness and persuasive reality that Browning invariably communicates
to his dreams. The three figures who in a few hours taste the height of
ecstasy and then the bitterness of disillusion or severance, are drawn
with remarkable psychologic force and truth. For all three love is the
absorbing passion, the most real thing in life, scornfully contrasted
with the reflected joys of the painter or the poet. Norbert's noble
integrity is of a kind which mingles in duplicity and intrigue with
disastrous results; he is too invincibly true to himself easily to act a
part; but he can control the secret hunger of his heart and give no
sign, until the consummate hour arrives when he may

"resume
Life after death (it is no less than life,
After such long unlovely labouring days)
And liberate to beauty life's great need
O' the beautiful, which, while it prompted work,
Suppress'd itself erewhile."

In the ecstasy of release from that suppression, every tree and flower
seems to be an embodiment of the harmonious freedom he had so long
foregone, as Wordsworth, chafing under his unchartered freedom, saw
everywhere the willing submission to Duty. Even

"These statues round us stand abrupt, distinct,
The strong in strength, the weak in weakness fixed,
The Muse for ever wedded to her lyre,
Nymph to her fawn, and Silence to her rose:
See God's approval on his universe!
Let us do so--aspire to live as these
In harmony with truth, ourselves being true!"

But it is the two women who attract Browning's most powerful handling.
One of them, the Queen, has hardly her like for pity and dread. A
"lavish soul" long starved, but kindling into the ecstasy of girlhood at
the seeming touch of love; then, as her dream is shattered by the
indignant honesty of Norbert, transmuted at once into the daemonic
Gudrun or Brynhild, glaring in speechless white-heat and implacable
frenz