y upon the man who has scorned her proffered heart and the hapless
girl he has chosen.[38] Between these powerful, rigid, and simple
natures stands Constance, ardent as they, but with the lithe and
palpitating ardour of a flame. She is concentrated Romance. Her love is
an intense emotion; but some of its fascination lies in its secrecy,--

"Complots inscrutable, deep telegraphs,
Long-planned chance meetings, hazards of a look";

she shrinks from a confession which "at the best" will deprive their
love of its spice of danger and make them even as their "five hundred
openly happy friends." She loves adventure, ruse, and stratagem for
their own sake. But she is also romantically generous, and because she
"owes this withered woman everything," is eager to sacrifice her own
hopes of happiness.

[Footnote 38: An anecdote to which Prof. Dowden has lately called
attention (_Browning_, p. 66) describes Browning in his last years as
demurring to the current interpretation of the _denoument_. Some one had
remarked that it was "a natural sequence that the guard should be heard
coming to take Norbert to his doom." "'Now I don't quite think that,'
answered Browning, _as if he were following out the play as a
spectator_. 'The queen has a large and passionate temperament.... She
would have died by a knife in her heart. The guard would have come to
carry away her dead body.'" The catastrophe here suggested is
undoubtedly far finer tragedy. But we cannot believe that this was what
Browning originally meant to happen. That Norbert and Constance expect
"doom" is obvious, and the queen's parting "glare" leaves the reader in
no doubt that they are right. They may, nevertheless, be wrong; but
what, then, is meant by the coming of the guard, and the throwing open
of the doors? The queen has in any case not died on the stage, for she
had left it; and if she died outside, how should they have come "to
carry away her dead body"?]

Were it not for its unique position in Browning's poetry, one might well
be content with a passing tribute to the great love canticle which
closes _Men and Women_--the crown, as it is in a pregnant sense the
nucleus, of the whole. But here, for "once, and only once, and for one
only," not only the dramatic instinct, which habitually coloured all his
speech, but the reticence which so hardly permitted it to disclose his
most intimate personal emotion, were deliberately overcome--overcome,
however, only in