“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 frenzy upon the man who has scorned her proffered heart and the hapless girl he has chosen.[38] Between these powerful, rigid, and simple natures stands Constance, ardent as they, but with the lithe and palpitating ardour of a flame.  She is concentrated Romance.  Her love is an intense emotion; but some of its fascination lies in its secrecy,—­

     “Complots inscrutable, deep telegraphs,
      Long-planned chance meetings, hazards of a look”;

she shrinks from a confession which “at the best” will deprive their love of its spice of danger and make them even as their “five hundred openly happy friends.”  She loves adventure, ruse, and stratagem for their own sake.  But she is also romantically generous, and because she “owes this withered woman everything,” is eager to sacrifice her own hopes of happiness.

[Footnote 38:  An anecdote to which Prof.  Dowden has lately called attention (Browning, p. 66) describes Browning in his last years as demurring to the current interpretation of the denoument.  Some one had remarked that it was “a natural sequence that the guard should be heard coming to take Norbert to his doom.” “‘Now I don’t quite think that,’ answered Browning, as if he were following out the play as a spectator.  ’The queen has a large and passionate temperament....  She would have died by a knife in her heart.  The guard would have come to carry away her dead body.’” The catastrophe here suggested is undoubtedly far finer tragedy.  But we cannot believe that this was what Browning originally meant to happen.  That Norbert and Constance expect “doom” is obvious, and the queen’s parting “glare” leaves the reader in no doubt that they are right.  They may, nevertheless, be wrong; but what, then, is meant by the coming of the guard, and the throwing open of the doors?  The queen has in any case not died on the stage, for she had left it; and if she died outside, how should they have come “to carry away her dead body"?]