he old huntsman:

"For the wound in the Duke's pride rankled fiery;
So they made no search and small inquiry";

and Gipsies thenceforth were hustled across the frontier.

Even the Duchess could not make love valid there. Reality was out of
them. . . . True, the huntsman, after thirty years, is still her sworn
adorer. He had stayed at the castle:

"I must see this fellow his sad life through--
He is our Duke, after all,
And I, as he says, but a serf and thrall";

--but, as soon as the Duke is dead, our friend intends to "go
journeying" to the land of the Gipsies, and there find his lady or hear
the last news of her:

"And when that's told me, what's remaining?"

For Jacynth is dead and all their children, and the world is too hard
for his explaining, and so he hopes to find a snug corner under some
hedge, and turn himself round and bid the world good-night, and sleep
soundly until he is waked to another world, where pearls will no longer
be cast before swine that can't value them. "_Amen._"

But at any rate this talk with his friend has made him see his little
lady again, and everything that they did since "seems such child's
play," with her away! So her love did one thing even there--just as one
likes to think that the unhappier Duchess, the Italian one, left
precisely such a memory in the heart of that officious fool who broke
the bough of cherries for her in the orchard.

And is it not good to think that almost immediately after _The Flight of
the Duchess_ was published, Browning was to meet the passionate-hearted
woman whom _he_ snatched almost from the actual death-bed that had been
prepared for her with as much of pomp and circumstance as was the
Duchess's life-in-death! With this in mind, it gives one a queer thrill
to read those lines of silenced prophecy:

"I foresee and I could foretell
Thy future portion, sure and well:
But those passionate eyes speak true, speak true,
Let them say what thou shalt do!"

FOOTNOTES:

[166:1] The "Toccata" which awakens these reflections in the poet is by
a Venetian composer, Baldassare Galuppi, who was born in 1706, and died
in 1785. He lived and worked in London from 1741 to 1744. "He abounded"
(says Vernon Lee, in her _Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy_)
"in melody, tender, pathetic, and brilliant, which in its extreme
simplicity and slightness occasionally rose to the highest beauty."

PART I