ageant
in which Truth is present only under a mask, being "forced to manifest
itself through falsehood." Juan, who declares that, unlike poets, "we
prose-folk" always dream, has, in effect, a visionary quality of
imagination which suits his thesis and his theme. The "dream figures" of
the famous ladies pass before us like a gorgeous tapestry,--some rich
Venetian rendering of a medieval _ballade du temps jadis_; then Venice
itself opens before us, all moving life and colour, under the
enchantment of Schumann's _Carnival_, only to resolve itself into a
vaster pageant of the world, with its mighty fanes of art and science,
which, seemingly "fixed as fate, not fairy-work," yet

"tremblingly grew blank
From bright, then broke afresh in triumph,--ah, but sank
As soon, for liquid change through artery and vein
O' the very marble wound its way."

The August of 1872 found Browning and his sister once more in France.
This time, however, not at Croisic but Saint Aubin--the primitive
hamlet on the Norman coast to which he had again been drawn by his
attachment to Joseph Milsand. At a neighbouring village was another old
friend, Miss Thackeray, who has left a charming account of the place.
They walked along a narrow cliff-path: "The sea-coast far below our
feet, the dried, arid vegetation of the sandy way, the rank yellow
snapdragon lining the paths.... We entered the Brownings' house. The
sitting-room door opened to the garden and the sea beyond--a fresh-swept
bare floor, a table, three straw chairs, one book upon the table." A
misunderstanding, now through the good offices of Milsand happily
removed, had clouded the friendship of Browning and Miss Thackeray; and
his joyous revulsion of heart has left characteristic traces in the poem
which he dedicated to his "fair friend." The very title is jest--an
outflow of high spirits in an exuberantly hearty hand-shake--"British
man with British maid"; the country of the "Red-cotton Night-cap" being
in fact, of course, the country which her playful realism had already
nicknamed "White-cotton Night-cap Country," from the white lawn
head-dress of the Norman women. Nothing so typical and everyday could
set Browning's imagination astir, and among the wilderness of white,
innocent and flavourless, he caught at a story which promised to be
"wrong and red and picturesque," and vary "by a splotch the righteous
flat of insipidity."

The story of M