uble of Love
consists for woman.

FOOTNOTES:

[205:1] Very curious is the uncertainty which this stanza leaves in the
minds of some. In Berdoe's _Browning Cyclopaedia_ the difficulty is
frankly stated, with an exquisitely ludicrous result. He interprets the
last line of _Parting at Morning_ as meaning that the woman "desires
more society than the seaside home affords"! But it is the _man_ who
speaks, not the woman. The confusion plainly arises from a
misinterpretation of "him" in "straight was a path of gold for him."
Berdoe reads this as "lucrative work for the man"! Of course "him"
refers to the sun who has "looked over the mountain's rim" . . . Here is
an instance of making obscurity where none really exists.

[208:1] Mr. Symons points out that in this extraordinary poem "fifteen
stanzas succeed one another without a single full stop or a real break
in sense or sound."

II

TROUBLE OF LOVE: THE WOMAN'S

I.--THE LADY IN "THE GLOVE"

Writing of the unnamed heroine of _Count Gismond_, I said that she had
one of the characteristic Browning marks--that of trust in the sincerity
of others. Here, in _The Glove_, we find a figure who resembles her in
two respects: she is nameless, and she is a "great" lady--a lady of the
Court. But now we perceive, full-blown, the flower of Court-training:
_dis_-trust. In this heroine (for all we are told, as young as the
earlier one) distrust has taken such deep root as to produce the very
prize-bloom of legend--that famous incident of the glove thrown into the
lion's den that her knight may go to fetch it. . . . Does this
interpretation of the episode amaze? It is that which our poet gives of
it. Distrust, and only that, impelled this lady to the action which,
till Browning treated it, had been regarded as a prize-bloom indeed, but
the flower not of distrust, but its antithesis--vanity! All the world
knows the story; all the world, till this apologist arrived, condemned
alone the lady. Like Francis I, each had cried:

". . . 'Twas mere vanity,
Not love, set that task to humanity!"

But Browning, who could detect the Court-grown, found excuse for her in
that lamentable gardening. The weed had been sown, as it was sown (so
much more tragically) for the earlier heroine; and little though we are
told of the latter lady's length of years, we may guess her, from this
alone, to be older. _She had been longer at Court_; its lesson had
pene