Love at its highest is
not yet known to us, but the passionate eyes of the Duchess tell us it
will not be a life of quiescence. Giving herself out freely for the
good of all she can never be alone again,--`We are beside thee in all
thy ways'. The great company of those who need her, the gypsy band of
all human claims. Death to such a life is but `the hand that ends a
dream'. What was to come after not even the Gypsy Queen could tell."--
Mrs. Owen (`Browning Soc. Papers', Part IV. p. 52*).

712. had: past subj., should have.

753. that pitiful method: i.e., patting her palfrey.

784. And then,--and then: his feelings overcome him.

16.

When the liquor's out why clink the cannikin?
I did think to describe you the panic in
The redoubtable breast of our master the manikin, {790}
And what was the pitch of his mother's yellowness,
How she turned as a shark to snap the spare-rib
Clean off, sailors say, from a pearl-diving Carib,
When she heard, what she called the flight of the feloness
--But it seems such child's play,
What they said and did with the lady away!
And to dance on, when we've lost the music,
Always made me--and no doubt makes you--sick.
Nay, to my mind, the world's face looked so stern
As that sweet form disappeared through the postern, {800}
She that kept it in constant good humor,
It ought to have stopped; there seemed nothing to do more.
But the world thought otherwise and went on,
And my head's one that its spite was spent on:
Thirty years are fled since that morning,
And with them all my head's adorning.
Nor did the old Duchess die outright,
As you expect, of suppressed spite,
The natural end of every adder
Not suffered to empty its poison-bladder: {810}
But she and her son agreed, I take it,
That no one should touch on the story to wake it,
For the wound in the Duke's pride rankled fiery;
So, they made no search and small inquiry:
And when fresh gypsies have paid us a visit, I've
Noticed the couple were never inquisitive,
But told them they're folks the Duke don't want here,
And bade them make haste and cross the frontier.
Brief, the Duchess was gone and the Duke was glad of it,
And the old one was in the young one's stead, {820}
And took, in her place, the household's head,
A