: the death of Anael seems as inevitable as the flash of
lightning after the concussion of thunder-clouds. But Thorold's suicide
is mere weakness, scarce a perverted courage; and Mildred's broken heart
was an ill not beyond the healing of a morally robust physician.
"Colombe's Birthday" has a certain remoteness of interest, really due to
the reader's more or less acute perception of the radical divergence,
for all Valence's greatness of mind and spirit, between the fair young
Duchess and her chosen lover: a circumstance which must surely stand in
the way of its popularity. Though "A Soul's Tragedy" has the saving
quality of humour, it is of too grim a kind to be provocative of
laughter.

In each of these plays[14] the lover of Browning will recall passage
after passage of superbly dramatic effect. But supreme in his
remembrance will be the wonderful scene in "The Return of the Druses,"
where the Prefect, drawing a breath of relief, is almost simultaneously
assassinated; and that where Anael, with every nerve at tension in her
fierce religious resolve, with a poignant, life-surrendering cry, hails
Djabal as _Hakeem_--as Divine--and therewith falls dead at his feet.
Nor will he forget that where, in the "Blot on the 'Scutcheon," Mildred,
with a dry sob in her throat, stammeringly utters--

"I--I--was so young!
Besides I loved him, Thorold--and I had
No mother; God forgot me: so I fell----"

or that where, "at end of the disastrous day," Luria takes the phial of
poison from his breast, muttering--

"Strange! This is all I brought from my own land
To help me."

[Footnote 14: "Strafford," 1837; "King Victor and King Charles," 1842;
"The Return of the Druses," and "A Blot on the 'Scutcheon," 1843;
"Colombe's Birthday," 1844; "Luria," and "A Soul's Tragedy," 1845.]

Before passing on from these eight plays to Browning's most imperishable
because most nearly immaculate dramatic poem, "Pippa Passes," and to
"Sordello," that colossal derelict upon the ocean of poetry, I should
like--out of an embarrassing quantity of alluring details--to remind the
reader of two secondary matters of interest pertinent to the present
theme. One is that the song in "A Blot on the 'Scutcheon," "There's a
woman like a dew-drop," written several years before the author's
meeting with Elizabeth Barrett, is so closely in the style of "Lady
Geraldine's Courtship," and other ballads by the sweet singer who
af