he ideals of Bohemia and of "respectability"!
They could have done these things, even as a married pair, but the
trouble is that then they would not have "dared" to do them. "People
would have talked." . . . Well, people may talk now, but they _have_
gained something. They have gained freedom to live their lives as they
choose--rightly or wrongly, but at any rate it is not "the world" that
sways them. They have learnt how much that good word is worth! What is
happening, this very hour, in that environment--here, for instance, in
the Institute, which they are just passing? "Guizot receives
Montalembert!" The two men are utterly opposed in everything that truly
signifies to each; yet now are exchanging empty courtesies. See the
courtyard all alight for the reception! Let them escape from it all, and
leave respectability to its false standards. _They_ are not
included--they are outcasts: "put forward your best foot!"

I accept this delightful poem with some reserve, for I think the lovers
had not so wholly emancipated themselves from "the world" as they were
pleased to think. The world still counted for them--as it counts for all
who remember so vehemently to denounce it. Moreover, married, they
could, were their courage complete, have beaten the world by forgetting
it. No more docile wild-beast than that much badgered creature when once
it recognises the true Contemner! To

"Feel the Boulevard break again
To warmth and light and bliss"

--on wild wet nights of wandering . . . this might even, through the
example of the Real Unfearing, become a craze! Yes--we must refuse to be
dazzled by rhetoric. These lovers also had their falling-short--they
could not _forget_ the world.

Hitherto we have considered the normal meetings of lovers. Now we turn
to the dream-meetings--the great encounters which all of us feel might
be, yet are not. There can be few to whom there has not come that
imagination of the spiritually compelled presence, which Browning has so
marvellously uttered in _Mesmerism_. Here, in these breathless
stanzas,[208:1] so almost literally mesmeric that, as we read them (or
rather draw them in at our own breathless lips!), we believe in the
actual coming of our loved one, and scarce dare look round lest we
should find the terrifying glory true . . . here the man sits alone in
his room at dead of night, and wills the woman to be with him. He brings
his thought to bear on her, "till he feels his hair tu