ising admirers. But surely equally rash is the assertion
that it will be the "poem of the future." However, our concern is not
with problematical estimates, but with the poem as it appears to _us_.
It is one of the most characteristic of Browning's productions. It would
be impossible for the most indolent reader or critic to attribute it,
even if anonymous, to another parentage. Coleridge alludes somewhere to
certain verses of Wordsworth's, with the declaration that if he had met
them howling in the desert he would have recognised their authorship.
"Fifine" would not even have to howl.

Browning was visiting Pornic one autumn, when he saw the gipsy who was
the original of "Fifine." In the words of Mrs. Orr, "his fancy was
evidently set roaming by the gipsy's audacity, her strength--the
contrast which she presented to the more spiritual types of womanhood;
and this contrast eventually found expression in a pathetic theory of
life, in which these opposite types and their corresponding modes of
attraction became the necessary complement of each other. As he laid
down the theory, Mr. Browning would be speaking in his own person. But
he would turn into some one else in the act of working it out--for it
insensibly carried with it a plea for yielding to those opposite
attractions, not only successively, but at the same time; and a modified
Don Juan would grow up under his pen."

One drawback to an unconditional enjoyment of Balzac is that every now
and again the student of the _Comedie Humaine_ resents the too obvious
display of the forces that propel the effect--a lesser phase of the
weariness which ensues upon much reading of the mere "human documents"
of the Goncourt school of novelists. In the same way, we too often see
Browning working up the electrical qualities, so that, when the
fulmination comes, we understand "just how it was produced," and, as
illogically as children before a too elaborate conjurer, conclude that
there is not so much in this particular poetic feat as in others which,
like Herrick's maids, continually do deceive. To me this is affirmable
of "Fifine at the Fair." The poet seems to know so very well what he is
doing. If he did not take the reader so much into his confidence, if he
would rely more upon the liberal grace of his earlier verse and less
upon the trained subtlety of his athletic intellect, the charm would be
the greater. The poem would have a surer duration as one of the author's
greater ac