with a peculiar mastery of everything in human nature which traverses and repudiates Romance.  The duke and the lady are simpler and slighter Hamlets—­Hamlets who have no agonies of self-questioning and self-reproach; intervening in the long pageant of the famous lovers of romantic tradition with the same disturbing shock as he in the bead-roll of heroic avengers.  The poet’s indignant denunciation of his lovers at the close, apparently for not violating the vows of marriage, is puzzling to readers who do not appreciate the extreme subtlety of Browning’s use of figure.  He was at once too much and too little of a casuist,—­too habituated to fine distinctions and too unaware of the pitfalls they often present to others,—­to understand that in condemning his lovers for wanting the energy to commit a crime he could be supposed to imply approval of the crime they failed to commit.

Lastly, in the outer periphery of his love poetry belong his rare and fugitive “dreams” of love. Women and Roses has an intoxicating swiftness and buoyancy of music.  But there is another and more sinister kind of love-dream—­the dream of an unloved woman.  Such a dream, with its tragic disillusion, Browning painted in his poignant and original In a Balcony.  It is in no sense a drama, but a dramatic incident in three scenes, affecting the fates of three persons, upon whom the entire interest is concentrated.  The three vivid and impressive character-heads stand out with intense and minute brilliance from a background absolutely blank and void.  Though the scene is laid in a court and the heroine is a queen, there is no bustle of political intrigue, no conflict between the rival attractions of love and power, as in Colombe’s Birthday.  Love is the absorbing preoccupation of this society, the ultimate ground of all undertakings.  There is vague talk of diplomatic victories, of dominions annexed, of public thanksgivings; but the statesman who has achieved all this did it all to win the hand of a girl, 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