As light where friends are"—

as her brother, in a memorable passage, describes her. She is so thrillingly alive, so beautiful and individual, so pathetic and pitiful in her desolation. Every word she speaks comes straight from her heart to ours. "I know nothing that is so affecting," wrote Dickens in a letter to Forster, "nothing in any book I have ever read, as Mildred's recurrence to that 'I was so young—had no mother.' I know no love like it, no passion like it, no moulding of a splendid thing after its conception like it."[[22]] Not till Pompilia do we find so pathetic a portrait of a woman.

In Thorold, Earl Tresham, we have an admirable picture of the head of a great house, proud above all things of the honour of the family and its yet stainless 'scutcheon, and proud, with a deep brotherly tenderness of his sister Mildred: a strong and fine nature, one whom men instinctively cite as "the perfect spirit of honour." Mertoun, the apparent hero of the play, is a much less prominent and masterly figure than Tresham, not so much from any lack of skill in his delineation, as from the essential ineffectualness of his nature. Guendolen Tresham, the Beatrice of the play (her lover Austin is certainly no Benedick) is one of the most pleasantly humorous characters in Browning. Her gay, light-hearted talk brightens the sombre action like a gleam of sunlight. And like her prototype, she is a true woman. As Beatrice stands by the calumniated Hero, so Guendolen stands by Mildred, and by her quick woman's heart and wit, her instinct of things, sees and seizes the missing clue, though too late, as it proves, to avert the impending disaster.

The play contains one of Browning's most delicate and musical lyrics, the serenade beginning, "There's a woman like a dew-drop." This is the first of the love-songs in long lines which Browning wrote so often at the end of his life, and so seldom earlier.

FOOTNOTES:

[21]

A contemporary account, written by Joseph Arnould to Alfred Domett, says: "The first night was magnificent ... there could be no mistake at all about the honest enthusiasm of the audience. The gallery (and this, of course, was very gratifying, because not to be expected at a play of Browning) took all the points quite as quickly as the pit, and entered into the general feeling and interest of the action far more than the boxes.... Altogether the first night was a triumph."—Robert Browning and Alfred Domett, 1906, p. 65.