ing; and
instinctively, I think, we ask ourselves a different one. _Will_ Evelyn,
on waking, "remember and understand"? Will she not have passed by very
far, in the spirit-world, this unconscious egotist? . . . True, he can
to some extent realise that probability--

"Delayed it may be for more lives yet,
Through worlds I shall traverse, not a few:
Much is to learn, much to forget,
Ere the time be come for taking you."

But Browning has used the wrong word here. She whom the "good stars that
met in her horoscope" had made of "spirit, fire, and dew," must, whether
it be her desire to do so or not, eternally keep part of herself from
the _taking_ of any man. . . . This is a curious lapse in Browning, to
whom women are, in the highest sense of the word, individuals--not
individualists, a less lovable and far more capturable thing. His
heroines are indeed instinct with devotion, but it is devotion that
chooses, not devotion that submits. A world of "gaiety and courage" lies
between the two conceptions--a world, no less, of widened responsibility
and heavier burdens for the devotee. If we compare a Browning heroine
with a Byron one, we shall almost have traversed that new country,
wherein the air grows ever more bracing as we travel onward.

With shrinking and timidity the Browning girl is unacquainted. As
experience grows, these sensations may sadly touch her, but she will not
have been prepared for them; no reason for feeling either had entered
her dream of life. She trusts--

"Trust, that's purer than pearl"--

and how much purer than shrinking! Free from the athletics and the
slang, she is antetype, indeed, of, say, the St. Andrews girl, that
admirable creation of our age; but she soars beyond her sister on the
wings of her more exquisite sensibility, and her deeper restfulness. Not
for her the perpetual pursuit of the india-rubber or the other kinds of
ball; she can conceive of the open air as something better than a place
to play games in. Like Wordsworth's Lucy--

"Hers shall be the breathing balm,
And hers the silence and the calm,
Of mute insensate things;"

and from such "being" she draws joys more instant and more glancingly
fair than Lucy drew. Among them is the joy of laughter. Of all gifts
that the fulness of time has brought to women, may we not reckon that
almost the best? A woman laughs nowadays, where, before, as an ideal she
smiled, or as a caricature gi