FOOTNOTES:

". . . the farm amongThe cherry-orchards, and how April snowedWhite blossom on her as she ran."

So says one of her comrades scornfully, and tells her how of course the home-folk have been careful to blot out all memories of one who has come to the town to lead the lifesheleads. She may be sure the old people have rubbed out the mark showing how tall she was on the door, and have

"Twisted her starling's neck, broken his cage,Made a dung-hill of her garden!"

She acquiesces mournfully, but loses herself again in memories: of her fig-tree that curled out of the cottage wall—

"They called it mine, I have forgotten why"

—and the noise the wasps made, eating the longpapers that were strung there to keep off birds in fruit-time. . . . As she murmurs thus to herself, her mouth twitches, and the same girl who had laughed before, laughs now again: "Would I be such a fool!"—and tellsherwish. The country-goose wants milk and apples, and another girl could think of nothing better than to wish "the sunset would finish"; but Zanze has a real desire, something worth talking about! It is that somebody she knows, somebody "greyer and older than her grandfather," would give her the same treat he gave last week—

"Feeding me on his knee with fig-peckers,Lampreys and red Breganze wine;"

while she had stained her fingers red by

"Dipping them in the wine to write bad words withOn the bright table: how he laughed!"

And as she recalls that night, she sees a burnished beetle on the ground before her, sparkling along the dust as it makes its slow way to a tuft of maize, and puts out her foot and kills it. The country girl recalls a superstition connected with these bright beetles—that if one was killed, the sun, "his friend up there," would not shine for two days. They said it in her country "when she was young"; and one of the others scoffs at the phrase, but looking at her, exclaims that indeed sheisno longer young: how thin her plump arms have got—does Cecco beat her still? But Cecco doesn't matter,nor the loss of her young freshness, so long as she keeps her "curious hair"—

"I wish they'd find a way to dye our hairYour colour . . .. . . The men say they are sick of black."

A girl who now speaks for the first and last time retorts upon this one that very likely "the men" are sick ofherhair, and does she pretend thatshehas tasted lampreys and ortolans . . . but in the midst of this new speaker's railing, the girl with wine-stained fingers exclaims—

"Why there! Is not that PippaWe are to talk to, under the window—quick— . . ."

The country girl thinks that if it were Pippa, she would be singing, as they had been told.

"Oh, you sing first," retorts the other—

"Then if she listens and comes close . . . I'll tell you,Sing that song the young English noble madeWho took you for the purest of the pure,And meant to leave the world for you—what fun!"

So, not the country girl, but she whose black hair discontents her, sings, and Pippa "listens and comes close," for the song has words as sweet as any of her own . . . and the red-fingered one calls to her to come closer still, they won't eat her—why, she seems to be "the very person the great rich handsome Englishman has fallen so violently in love with." She shall hear all about it; and on the stepsof the church Pippa is told by this creature, Zanze, how a foreigner, "with blue eyes and thick rings of raw silk-coloured hair," had gone to the mills at Asolo a month ago and fallen in love with Pippa. Pippa, however, will not keep him in love with her, unless she takes more care of her personal appearance—she must "pare her nails pearlwise," and buy shoes "less like canoes" for her small feet;thenshe may hope to feast upon lampreys and drink Breganze, as Zanze does. . . . And now Pippa sings one of her songs, and it might have been chosen expressly to please the country girl. It begins—

"Overhead the tree-tops meet,Flowers and grass spring 'neath our feet;There was nought above me, and nought belowMy childhood had not learned to know"

—a little story of an innocent girl's way of making out for herself only the sweetness of the world, the majesty of the heavens . . . and just when all seemed on the verge of growing clear, and out of the "soft fifty changes" of the moon, "no unfamiliar face" could look, the sweet life was cut short—

"Suddenly God took me . . ."

As Pippa sang those words, she passed on. She had heard enough of the four girls' talk, even were they not now interrupted by a sudden clatter inside Monsignor's house—a sound of calling, of quick heavy feet, of cries and the flinging down of a man,and then a noise as of dragging a bound prisoner out. . . . Monsignor appeared for an instant at the window as she, coming from the Duomo, passed his house. His aspect disappointed her—

"No mere mortal has a rightTo carry that exalted air;Best people are not angels quite . . ."

and with that one look at him, she passed on to Asolo.

What was the noise that broke out as Pippa finished her song? The loud call which came first was Monsignor's, summoning his guards from an outer chamber to gag and bind his steward. This steward had been supping alone with the Bishop, who had come not only (as Pippa said in the morning, choosing him as the ideal person for her pretending) "to bless the home of his dead brother," but also to take possession of that brother's estate. . . . He knows the steward to be a rascal; but he himself, the "holy and beloved priest," is a good deal of a rascal too; he has connived at his brother's death, and had connived at his mode of life. Now the steward is preparing to blackmail the Bishop, as he had blackmailed the Bishop's brother. Both are aware that the dead man had a child; Monsignor believes that this child was murdered by the steward at the instigation of a younger brother, who wished to succeed to theestates. He urges the man to confess; otherwise he shall be arrested by Monsignor's people who are in the outer room. "Did you throttle or stab my brother's infant—come now?"[77:1]

But the steward has yet another card to play; moreover, so many enemies now surround him that his life is probably forfeited anyhow, so he will tell the truth. And the truth is that the child was not murdered by him or anyone else. The child—the girl—is close at hand; he sees her every day, he saw her this morning. Now, shall he make away with her for Monsignor? Not "the stupid obvious sort of killing . . . of course there is to be no killing; but at Rome the courtesans perish off every three years, and he can entice her thither, has begun operations already"—making use of a certain Bluphocks, an Englishman. Monsignor will notformallyassent, of course . . . but will he give the steward time to cross the Alps? The girl is "but a little black-eyed pretty singing Felippa,[77:2]gay silk-winding girl"; some women are to pass off Bluphocks as a somebody, and once Pippa entangled—it will be best accomplished through her singing. . . . Well, Monsignor has listened; Monsignor conceives—is it a bargain?

It was precisely as the steward asked that question that Pippa finished her song of a maiden'slesson and its ending, and Monsignor leaped up and shouted to his guards. . . . The singing by which "little black-eyed pretty Felippa" was to be entangled had rescued instead the soul of her Fourth Happiest One from this deep infamy.

The great Day is over. Pippa, back in her room, finds horribly uppermost among her memories the talk of those lamentable four girls. It had spoilt the sweetness of her day; it spoils now, for a while, her own sweetness. Her comments on it have none of the wayward charm of her morning fancies, for Pippa is very human—she can envy and decry, swinging loose from the central steadiness of her nature like many another of us, obsessed like her by some vile happening of the hours. Just as we might find our whole remembrance of a festival thus overlaid by malice and ugliness,shefinds it; she can only think "how pert that girl was," and how glad she is not to be like her. Yet, all the same, she does not see why she should not have been told who it was that "passed that jest upon her" of the Englishman in love—no foreigner had come to the mills that she recollects. . . . And perhaps, after all, if Luca raises the wage, she may be able to buy shoes next year, and not look any worse than Zanze.

But gradually the atmosphere of her mind seems restored; the fogs of envy and curiosity begin toclear off—she goes over the game of make-believe, how she was in turn each of the Four . . . but no! the miasma is still in the air, and she's "tired of fooling," and New Year's Day is over, and ill or well,shemust be content. . . . Even her lily's asleep, but she will wake it up, and show it the friend she has plucked for it—the flower she gathered as she passed the house on the hill. . . . Alas! even the flower seems infected. She compares it, "this pampered thing," this double hearts-ease of the garden, with the wild growth, and once more Zanze comes to mind—isn't she like the pampered blossom? And if there were a king of the flowers, "and a girl-show held in his bowers," which would he like best, the Zanze or the Pippa? . . . No: nothing will conquer her dejection; fancies will not do, awakening sleepy lilies will not do—

"Oh what a drear dark close to my poor day!How could that red sun drop in that black cloud?"

and despairingly she accepts the one truth that seems to confront her: "Day's turn is over, now arrives the night's;" the larks and thrushes and blackbirds have had their hour; owls and bats and such-like things rule now . . . and listlessly she begins to undress herself. She is so alone; she has nothing but fancies to play with—this morning's, for instance, of being anyone she liked. She had played her game, had kept it up loyally with herself all day—what was the good?

"Now, one thing I should like to really know:How near I ever might approach all thoseI only fancied being, this long day:Approach, I mean, so as to touch them, soAs to . . . in some way . . . move them—if you please,Do good or evil to them some slight way.For instance, if I windSilk to-morrow, my silk may bindAnd border Ottima's cloak's hem . . ."

Sitting on her bed, undressed, the solitary child thus broods. No nearer than that can she get—her silk might border Ottima's cloak's hem. . . . But she cannot endure this dejection: back to her centre of gaiety, trust, and courage Pippa must somehow swing—and how shall she achieve it? There floats into her memory the hymn which she had murmured in the morning—

"All service ranks the same with God."

But even this can help her only a little—

"True in some sense or other, I suppose . . ."

She lies down; she can pray no more than that; the hymn no doubt is right, "some way or other," and with its message thus almost mocking in her ears, she falls asleep—the lonely little girl who has saved four souls to-day, and does not know, will never know; but will be again, to-morrow perhaps, when that sad talk on the church steps is faded from her memory, the gay, brave, trustful spirit who, by merely being that, had sung her Four Happiest Ones up toward "God in his heaven."

[24:1]Asolo, in the Trevisan, is a very picturesque mediæval fortified town, the ancient Acelum. It lies at the foot of a hill which is surrounded by the ruins of an old castle; before it stretches the great plain of the rivers Brenta and Piave, where Treviso, Vicenza, and Padua may be clearly recognised. The Alps encircle it, and in the distance rise the Euganean Hills. Venice can be discerned on the extreme eastern horizon, which ends in the blue line of the Adriatic. The village of Asolo is surrounded by a wall with mediæval turrets.—Berdoe,Browning Cyclopædia, p. 50.

[26:1]Another line that I should like to omit, for the following words, wholly in character, say all that the ugly ones have boomed at us so incredibly. But here the rhyme-scheme provides a sort of unpardonable excuse.

[49:1]Dr. Berdoe and Mrs. Orr.

[52:1]All the talk between the students is in prose.

[52:2]The long shoaly island in the Lagoon, immediately opposite Venice.

[64:1]This song refers to Catherine of Cornaro, the last Queen of Cyprus, who came to her castle at Asolo when forced to resign her kingdom to the Venetians in 1489. "She lived for her people's welfare, and won their love by her goodness and grace."

[68:1]"The name meansBlue-Fox, and is a skit on theEdinburgh Review, which is bound in blue and fox" (Dr. Furnivall).

[77:1]The dialogue between Monsignor and the steward is in prose.

[77:2]Having made her Monsignor's niece, observes Mr. Chesterton, "Browning might just as well have made Sebald her long-lost brother, and Luigi a husband to whom she was secretly married."

I have said that, to my perception, the most characteristic mark in Browning's portrayal of women is his admiration for dauntlessness and individuality; and this makes explicable to me the failure which I constantly perceive in his dramatic presentment of her whose "innocence" (as the term is conventionally accepted) is her salient quality. The type, immortal and essential, is one which a poet must needs essay to show; and Browning, when he showed it through others, or in his own person hymned it, found words for its delineation which lift the soul as it were to morning skies. But when words are further called upon for itsexpression, when such a woman, in short, has to speak for herself, he rarely makes her do so without a certain consciousness of that especial trait in her—and hence her speech must of necessity ring false, for innocence knows nothing of itself.

So marked is this failure, to my sense, that I cannot refuse the implication which comes along with it: that only theoretically, only as it were bydeference to others, did the attribute, in that particular apprehension of it, move him to admiration. I do not, of course, mean anything so inconceivable as that he questioned the loveliness of the "pure in heart"; I mean merely that he questioned the artificial value which has been set upon physical chastity—and that when departure from this was thecircumstancethrough which he had to show the more essential purity, his instinctive scepticism drove him to the forcing of a note which was not really native to his voice. For always (to my sense) when he presents dramatically a girl or woman in the grip of this circumstance, he gives her words, and feelings to express through them, which only the Frenchmièvrecan justly describe. He does not, in short, reveal her as she is, but only as others see her—and, among those others, not himself.

In Browning this might seem the stranger because he was so wholly untouched by cynicism; but here we light upon a curious paradox—the fact that the more "worldly" the writer, the better can he (as a general rule and other things being equal) display this type. It may be that such a writer can regard it analytically, can see what are the elements which make it up; it may be that the deeper reverence felt for it by the idealist is precisely that which draws him toward exaggeration—that his fancy, brooding with closed eyes upon the "thing enskied and sainted," thus becomes inclined to mawkishness . . . itmaybe, I say, but at the bottom of myheart I do not feel that that is the explanation. One with which I am better satisfied emerges from a line of verse already quoted:

"For each man kills the thing he loves";

and the man most apt for such "killing" is precisely he who appraises most shrewdly the thing he kills. As the cool practised libertine is oftenest attracted by the immature girl, so the ardent inexperienced man of any age will be drawn to the older woman; and the psychology of this matter of everyday experience is closely akin to the paradox in artistic creation of which I now speak.

Browning, who saw woman so clearly as a creature with her definite and justified demand upon life, saw, by inevitable consequence, that for woman to "depart from innocence" (again, in the conventional sense of the words) is not her most significant error; and this conviction necessarily reacted upon his presentment of those in whom such purity is the most salient quality—a type of which, as I have said, the poet is bound to attempt the portrayal. Browning's instinctive questioning of the "man-made" value then betrays itself—he exaggerates, he loses grasp, for he is singing in a mode not native to his temperament.

The character of Mildred inA Blot in the 'Scutcheonis a striking example of this. She is a young girl who has been drawn by her innocent passion intocomplete surrender to her lover. He, after this surrender, seeks her in marriage from her brother, who stands in the place of both parents to the orphan girl. The brother consents, unknowing; but after his consent, learns from a servant that Mildred has yielded herself to a man—he learns notwhom. She, accused, makes no denial, gives no name, and to her brother's consternation, proposes thus to marry her suitor, whom Tresham thinks to be in ignorance of her error. Tresham violently repudiates her; then, meeting beneath her window the cloaked lover, attacks him, forces him to reveal himself, learns that he and the accepted suitor are one and the same, and kills him—Mertoun (the lover) making no defence. Tresham goes to Mildred and tells her what he has done; she dies of the hearing, and he, having taken poison after the revelation of Mertoun's identity, dies also.

The defects in this story are so obvious that I need hardly point them out. Most prominent of all is the difficulty of reconciling Earl Mertoun's conduct with that of a rational being. He is all that in Mildred's suitor might be demanded, yet, loving her deeply and so loved by her, he has feared to ask her brother for her hand, because of his reverence for this Earl Tresham.

". . . I was young,And your surpassing reputation kept meSo far aloof . . ."

Thus he explains himself. He feared to ask for her hand, yet did not fear to seduce her! The thing is so absurd that it vitiates all the play, which indeed but once or twice approaches aught that we can figure to ourselves of reality in any period of history. "Mediæval" is a strange adjective, used by Mrs. Orr to characterise a work of which the date is placed by Browning himself in the eighteenth century.

Mildred is but fourteen: an age at which, with our modern sense of girlhood as, happily, in this land we now know it, we find ourselves unable to apprehend her at all. Instinctively we assign to her at least five years more, since even these would leave her still a child—though not at any moment in the play does she actually so affect us, for Mildred is never a child, never even a young girl. Immature indeed she is, but it is with the immaturity which will not develop, which has nothing to do with length of years. To me, the failure here is absolute; she never comes to life. Every student of Browning knows of the enthusiasm which Dickens expressed for this piece and this character:

"Browning's play has thrown me into a perfect passion of sorrow. To say that there is anything in its subject save what is lovely, true, deeply affecting . . . is to say that there is no light in the sun, and no heat in the blood. . . . I know nothing that is so affecting, nothing in any book I have ever read, as Mildred's recurrence to that 'I was so young—I had no mother.'"

Such ardour well might stir us to agreement, were it not that Dickens chose for its warmest expression the very centre of our disbelief: Mildred'srecurrenceto that cry. . . . The cry itself—I cannot be alone in thinking—rings false, and the recurrence, therefore, but heaps error upon error. When I imagine an ardent girl in such a situation, almost anything she could have been made to say would to me seem more authentic than this. The first utterance, moreover, occurs before she knows that Tresham has learnt the truth—it occurs, in soliloquy, immediately after an interview with her lover.

"I was so young, I loved him so, I hadNo mother, God forgot me, and I fell."

I fell. . . No woman, in any extremity, says that; that is what is said by others of her. AndGod forgot me—is this the thought of one who "loves him so"? . . . The truth is that we have here the very commonplace of the theatre: the wish to have it both ways, to show, yet not to reveal—the "dramatic situation," in short, set out because itisdramatic, not because it is true. We cannot suppose that Browning meant Earl Mertoun for a mere seducer, ravishing from a maiden that which she did not desire to give—yet the words he here puts in Mildred's mouth bear no other interpretation. Either she is capable of passion, or she is not. If sheis, sorrow for the sorrow that her recklessness may cause to others will indeed putpain and terror in her soul, but she will not, can not, say that "God forgot her": those words are alien to the passionate. If she isnot, if Mertoun is the mere seducer . . . but the suggestion is absurd. We know that he is like herself, as herself should have been shown us, young love incarnate, rushing to its end mistakenly—wrong, high, and pure. These errors are the errors of quick souls, of souls that, too late realising all, yet feel themselves unstained, and know that not God forgot them, but they this world in which we dwell.

In her interview with Tresham after the servant's revelation, I find the same untruth. He delivers a long rhapsody on brothers' love, saying that it exceeds all other in its unselfishness. Her sole rejoinder—and here she does for one second attain to authenticity—is the question: "What is this for?" He, after some hesitation, tells her what he knows, calls upon her to confess, she standing silent until, at end of the arraignment, he demands the lover's name. Listen to her answer:

. . . Thorold, do you deviseFit expiation for my guilt, if fitThere be! 'Tis nought to say that I'll endureAnd bless you—that my spirit yearns to purgeHer stains off in the fierce renewing fire:But do not plunge me into other guilt!Oh, guilt enough . . ."

She of course refuses the name. He tells her to pronounce, then, her own punishment.

Again her answer, in the utter falseness to all truth of its abasement, well-nigh sickens the soul:

"Oh, Thorold, you must never tempt me thus!To die here in this chamber, by that sword,Would seem like punishment; so should I glideLike an arch-cheat, into extremest bliss!"

Comment upon that seems to me simply impossible. This is the woman to whom, but a page or two back, young Mertoun has sung the exquisite song, known to most readers of Browning's lyrics:

"There's a woman like a dewdrop, she's so purer than the purest,And her noble heart's the noblest, yes, and her sure faith's the surest" . . .

Already in that hour with her, Mertoun must have learnt that some of those high words were turned to slighter uses when they sang of Mildred Tresham. In that hour he has spoken of the "meeting that appalled us both" (namely, the meeting with her brother, when he was to ask for her hand), saying that it is over and happiness begins, "such as the world contains not." When Mildred answers him with, "This will not be," we could accept, believingly, were only the sense of doom what her reply brought with it. But "this will not be," because they do not "deserve the whole world's best of blisses."

"Sin has surprised us, so will punishment."

And how strange, how sad for a woman is it, to see with what truth and courage Browning can make Mertoun speak! Each word thathesays can be brave and clear for all its recognition of their error; no word thatshesays. . . . Her creator does not understand her; almost, thus, we do feel Mildred to be real, so quick is our resentment of the unrealities heaped on her. Imagining beforehand the moment when she shall receive in presence of them all "the partner of my guilty love" (is not here the theatre in full blast?), the deception she must practise—called by her, in the vein so cruelly assigned her, "this planned piece of deliberate wickedness" . . . imagining all this, she foresees herself unable to pretend, pouring forth "all our woeful story," and pictures them aghast, "as round some cursed fount that should spirt water and spouts blood." . . . "I'll not!" she cries—

". . . 'I'll not affect a graceThat's gone from me—gone once, and gone for ever!'"

"Gone once, and gone for ever." True, when the graceisgone; but surely not from her, in any real sense, had it gone—and would she not, in the deep knowledge of herself which comes with revelation to the world, have felt that passionately? There are accusations of ourselves which indeed arraign ourselves, yet leave us our best pride. To me, not the error which made her prey topenitence was Mildred Tresham's "fall," but those crude cries of shame.

We take refuge in her immaturity, and in the blighting influence of her brother—that prig of prigs, that "monomaniac of family pride and conventional morality,"[90:1]Thorold, Earl Tresham; but not thus can we solace ourselves for Browning's failure. What a girl he might have given us in Mildred, had he listened only to himself! But, not yet in full possession of that self, he set up as an ideal the ideal of others, trying dutifully to see it as they see it, denying dutifully his deepest instinct; and, thus apostate, piled insincerity on insincerity, until at last no truth is anywhere, and we read on with growing alienation as each figure loses all of such reality as it ever had, and even Gwendolen, the "golden creature"—his own dauntless, individual woman, seeing and feeling truly through every fibre of her being—is lost amid the fog, is stifled in the stifling atmosphere, and only at the last, when Mildred and her brother are both dead, can once more say the word which lights us back to truth:

"Ah, Thorold, we can but—remember you!"

It was indeed alltheycould do; but we, more fortunate, can forget him, imaging to ourselves the Mildred that Browning could have given us—the Mildred of whom her brother is made to say:

"You cannot know the good and tender heart,Its girl's trust and its woman's constancy,How pure yet passionate, how calm yet kind,How grave yet joyous, how reserved yet freeAs light where friends are . . ."

There she is, as Browning might have shown her! "Control's not for this lady," Tresham adds—the sign-manual of a Browning woman. As I have said, he can display this lovely type through others, can sing it in his own person, as in the exquisite dewdrop lyric; but once let her speak for herself—he obeys the world and its appraisals, and the truth departs from him; we have the Mildred Tresham of the theatre, of "the partner of my guilty love," of "Oh, Thorold, you must never tempt me thus!" of (in a later scene) "I think I might have urged some little point in my defence to Thorold"; of that last worst unreality of all, when Thorold has told her of his murder of her lover, and she cries:

". . . I—forgive not,But bless you, Thorold, from my soul of souls!There! Do not think too much upon the past!The cloud that's broke was all the same a cloudWhile it stood up between my friend and you;You hurt him 'neath its shadow: but is thatSo past retrieve? I have his heart, you know;I may dispose of it: I give it you!It loves you as mine loves!"

True, she is to die, and so is to rejoin her lover; but, thus rejoined, will "blots upon the 'scutcheon"seem to them the all-sufficient claim for Thorold's deed—Thorold who dies with these words on his lips:

". . . You hold our 'scutcheon up.Austin, no blot on it! You see how bloodMust wash one blot away; the first blot cameAnd the first blood came. To the vain world's eyeAll's gules again: no care to the vain worldFrom whence the red was drawn!"

And on Austin's cry that "no blot shall come!" he answers:

"I said that: yet it did come. Should it come,Vengeance is God's, not man's. Remember me!"

Vengeance: how do they who are met again in the spirit-world regard that word, that "God"?

[90:1]Berdoe.Browning Cyclopædia.

To me, Balaustion is the queen of Browning's women—nay, I am tempted to proclaim her queen of every poet's women. For in her meet all lovelinesses, and to make her dearer still, some are as yet but in germ (what a mother she will be, for example); so that we have, with all the other beauties, the sense of the unfolding rose—"enmisted by the scent it makes," in a phrase of her creator's which, though in the actual context it does not refer to her, yet exquisitely conveys her influence on these two works. "Rosy Balaustion": she is that, as well as "superb, statuesque," in the admiring apostrophes from Aristophanes, during the long, close argument of theApology. In that piece, the Bald Bard himself is made to show her to us; and though it follows, not precedes, theAdventure, I shall steal from him at once, presenting in his lyric phrases our queen before we crown her.

He comes to her home in Athens on the night when Balaustion learns that her adored Euripidesis dead. She and her husband, Euthukles, are "sitting silent in the house, yet cheerless hardly," musing on the tidings, when suddenly there come torch-light and knocking at the door, and cries and laughter: "Open, open, Bacchos[94:1]bids!"—and, heralded by his chorus and the dancers, flute-boys, all the "banquet-band," there enters, "stands in person, Aristophanes." Balaustion had never seen him till that moment, nor he her:

"Forward he stepped: I rose and fronted him";

and as thus for the first time they meet, he breaks into a pæan of admiration:

"'You, lady? What, the Rhodian? Form and face,Victory's self upsoaring to receiveThe poet? Right they named you . . . some rich name,Vowel-buds thorned about with consonants,Fragrant, felicitous, rose-glow enrichedBy the Isle's unguent: some diminished endInion' . . ."

and trying to recall that name "inion," he guesses two or three at random, seizing thus the occasion to express her effect on him:

"'Phibalion, for the mouth split red-fig-wise,Korakinidion, for the coal-black hair,Nettarion, Phabion, for the darlingness?'"

But none of these is right; "it was some fruit-flower"; and at last it comes:Balaustion, Wild-Pomegranate-Bloom, and he exclaims in ecstasy,"Thanks, Rhodes!"—for her fellow-countrymen had found this name for her, so apt in every way that her real name was forgotten, and as Balaustion she shall live and die.

"Nettarion, Phabion, for the darlingness"; and for all her intellect and ardour, it is greatlythisthat makes Balaustion queen—the lovely eager sweetness, the tenderness, the "darlingness": Aristophanes guessed almost right!

How did she win the name of Wild-Pomegranate-Flower? We learn it from herself in theAdventure. Let us hear: let us feign ourselves members of the little band of friends, all girls, with their charming, chiming names: "Petalé, Phullis, Charopé, Chrusion"—to whom she cries in the delightful opening:

"About that strangest, saddest, sweetest songI, when a girl, heard in Kameiros once,And after, saved my life by? Oh, so gladTo tell you the adventure!"

Part of the adventure is historical. In the second stage of the Peloponnesian War (that famous contention between the Athenians and the inhabitants of Peloponnesus which began on May 7, 431b.c.and lasted twenty-seven years), the Athenian General, Nikias, had suffered disaster at Syracuse, and had given himself up, with all his army, to the Sicilians. But the assurances of safety which he had received were quickly proved false. He was no sooner in the hands of the enemy than he was shamefully putto death with his naval ally, Demosthenes; and his troops were sent to the quarries, where the plague and the hard labour lessened their numbers and increased their miseries. When this bad news reached Rhodes, the islanders rose in revolt against the supremacy of Athens, and resolved to side with Sparta. Balaustion[96:1]was there, and she passionately protested against this decision, crying to "who would hear, and those who loved me at Kameiros"[96:2]:

". . . No!Never throw Athens off for Sparta's sake—Never disloyal to the life and lightOf the whole world worth calling world at all!* * * * *To Athens, all of us that have a soul,Follow me!"

". . . No!Never throw Athens off for Sparta's sake—Never disloyal to the life and lightOf the whole world worth calling world at all!

* * * * *

To Athens, all of us that have a soul,Follow me!"

and thus she drew together a little band, "and found a ship at Kaunos," and they turned

"The glad prow westward, soon were out at sea,Pushing, brave ship with the vermilion cheek,Proud for our heart's true harbour."

But they were pursued by pirates, and, fleeing from these, drove unawares into the harbour of that very Syracuse where Nikias and Demosthenes had perished, and in whose quarries their countrymen were slaves. The inhabitants refused them admission, for they had heard, as the ship came intoharbour, Balaustion singing "that song of ours which saved at Salamis." She had sprung upon the altar by the mast, and carolled it forth to encourage the oarsmen; and now it was vain to tell the Sicilians that these were Rhodians who had cast in their lot with the Spartan League, for the Captain of Syracuse answered:

"Ay, but we heard all Athens in one ode . . .You bring a boatful of Athenians here";

and Athenians they would not have at Syracuse, "with memories of Salamis" to stir up the slaves in the quarry.

No prayers, no blandishments, availed the Rhodians; they were just about to turn away and face the pirates in despair, when somebody raised a question, and

". . . 'Wait!'Cried they (and wait we did, you may be sure).'That song was veritable Aischulos,Familiar to the mouth of man and boy,Old glory: how about Euripides?Might you know any of his verses too?'"

Browning here makes use of the historical fact that Euripides was reverenced far more by foreigners and the non-Athenian Greeks than by the Athenians—for Balaustion, "the Rhodian," had been brought up in his worship, though she knew and loved the other great Greek poets also; and already it was known to our voyagers that the captives in thequarries had found that those who could "teach Euripides to Syracuse" gained indulgence far beyond what any of the others could obtain. Thus, when the question sounded, "Might you know any of his verses too?" the captain of the vessel cried:

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