I shall not multiply instances; my aim is not destructive. But I think the unmeasured praise of Browning by some of his admirers has worked against, not for, him. It irritates to read of the "perfection" of this speech—which has beauties so many and so great that the faults may be confessed, and leave it still among the lovely things of our literature.
I turn now gladly to those beauties. Chief is the pride and love of the new-made mother—never more exquisitely shown, and here the more poignantly shown because she is on her death-bed, and has not seen her little son again since the "great fortnight." She thinks how well it was that he had been taken from her before that awful night at the Villa:
"He was too young to smile and save himself;"
—for she does not dream, not then remembering the "money" which was at the heart of all her woe, that he would have been spared for that money's sake. . . . But she had not seen him again, and now will never see him. And when he grows up and comes to be her age, he will ask what his mother was like, and people will say, "Like girls of seventeen," and he will think of some girl he knows who titters and blushes when he looks at her. . . . That is not the way for a mother!
"Therefore I wish someone will please to say
I looked already old, though I was young;"
—and she begs to be told that she looks "nearer twenty." Her name too is not a common one—that may help to keep apart
"A little the thing I am from what girls are."
But how hard for him to find out anything about her:
"No father that he ever knew at all,
Nor never had—no, never had, I say!"
—and a mother who only lived two weeks, and Pietro and Violante gone! Only his saint to guard him—that was why she chose the new one; he would not be tired of guarding namesakes. . . . After all, she hopes her boy will come to disbelieve her history, as herself almost does. It is dwindling fast to that: