Even bitterness were less destructive to the woman's hope than this strange counting of the cost, this self-sufficiency. Our sympathy must leave her at this phase; and sympathy for her was surely Browning's aim? But possibly it was not; and if not, this indeed is subtle.
VIII.—BESIDE THE DRAWING-BOARD
She had turned wearily from the household cares, the daily direction of a little peasant-servant, to her drawing-board. A cast from Leonardo da Vinci of a woman's hand is her model, and for an hour she has been happily working. She has failed; but that has not clouded joy nor damped ardour.
"Its beauty mounted into my brain,"
and, effacing the failures, she has yielded to a fancy—has taken the chalk between her lips, instead of her fingers:
"With soul to help if the mere lips failed,
I kissed all right where the drawing ailed,
Kissed fast the grace that somehow slips
Still from one's soulless finger-tips."
This hand was that of a worshipped woman. Her fancy sets the ring on it, by which one knows
"That here at length a master found
His match, a proud lone soul its mate."
Not even Da Vinci's pencil had been able to trace all the beauty—