Colombe of Ravestein, Duchess of Juliers and Cleves, is surprised, on the first anniversary of her accession (the day being also her birthday), by a rival claimant to the duchy, Prince Berthold, who proves to be in fact the true heir.  Berthold, instead of pressing his claim, offers to marry her.  But he conceives the honour and the favour to be sufficient, and makes no pretence at offering love as well.  On the other hand, Valence, a poor advocate of Cleves, who has stood by Colombe when all her other friends failed, offers her his love, a love to which she can only respond by “giving up the world”; in other words, by relinquishing her duchy, and the alliance with a Prince who is on the way to be Emperor.  We have nothing to do with the question of who has the right and who has the might:  that matter is settled, and the succession agreed on, almost from the beginning.  Nor are we made to feel that any disgrace or reputation of weakness will rest on Colombe if she gives up her duchy; not even that the pang at doing so will be over-acute or entirely unrelieved.  All the interest centres in the purely personal and psychological bearings of the act.  It is perhaps a consequence of this that the style is somewhat different from that of any previous play.  Any one who notices the stage directions will see that the persons of the drama frequently speak “after a pause.”  The language which they use is, naturally enough, more deliberate and reflective, the lines are slower and more weighty, than would be appropriate amid the breathless action of A Blot in the ’Scutcheon or The Return of the Druses.  A certain fiery quality, a thrilling, heart-stirred and heart-stirring tone, which we find in these is wanting; but the calm sweep of the action is carried onward by a verse whose large harmonies almost recall Paracelsus.

Colombe, the true heroine of the play named after her is, if not “the completest full-length portrait of a woman that Browning has drawn,” certainly one of the sweetest and most stable.  Her character develops during the course of the play; as she herself says,

      “This is indeed my birthday—­soul and body,
      Its hours have done on me the work of years—­”

and it leaves her a nobler and stronger, yet not less charming woman than it found her.  Hitherto she has been a mere “play-queen,” shut in from action, shut in from facts and the world, and caring only to be gay and amused.  But now, at the first and yet final trial, she is proved and found to be of noble metal.  The gay girlishness of the young Duchess, her joyous and generous light heart; her womanliness, her earnestness, her clear, deep, noble nature, attract us from her first words, and leave us, after the hour we have spent in her presence, with a memory like that of some woman whom we have met, for an hour or a moment, in the world or in books.