Six poems of exultant love--and a man speaks in each! With Browning, the woman much more rarely is articulate; and when she does speak, even _he_ puts in her mouth the less triumphant utterances. From the nameless girl in _Count Gismond_ and from Balaustion--these only--do we get the equivalent of the man's exultation in such lyrics as I have just now shown. . . . Always the tear assigned to woman! It may be "true"; I think it is not at least _so_ true, but true in some degree it must be, since all legend will thus have it. What then shall a woman say? That the time has come to alter this? That woman cries "for nothing," like the children? That she does not understand so well as man the ends of love? Or that she understands them better? . . . Perhaps all of these things; perhaps some others also. Let us study now, at all events, the "tear"; let us see in what, as Browning saw her, the Trouble of Love consists for woman. FOOTNOTES: [205:1] Very curious is the uncertainty which this stanza leaves in the minds of some. In Berdoe's _Browning Cyclopaedia_ the difficulty is frankly stated, with an exquisitely ludicrous result. He interprets the last line of _Parting at Morning_ as meaning that the woman "desires more society than the seaside home affords"! But it is the _man_ who speaks, not the woman. The confusion plainly arises from a misinterpretation of "him" in "straight was a path of gold for him." Berdoe reads this as "lucrative work for the man"! Of course "him" refers to the sun who has "looked over the mountain's rim" . . . Here is an instance of making obscurity where none really exists. [208:1] Mr. Symons points out that in this extraordinary poem "fifteen stanzas succeed one another without a single full stop or a real break in sense or sound." II TROUBLE OF LOVE: THE WOMAN'S I.--THE LADY IN "THE GLOVE" Writing of the unnamed heroine of _Count Gismond_, I said that she had one of the characteristic Browning marks--that of trust in the sincerity of others. Here, in _The Glove_, we find a figure who resembles her in two respects: she is nameless, and she is a "great" lady--a lady of the Court. But now we perceive, full-blown, the flower of Court-training: _dis_-trust. In this heroine (for all we are told, as young as the earlier one) distrust has taken such deep root as to produce the very prize-bloom of legend--that famous incident of the glove thrown into the lion's den that her knight may go to fetch it. . . . Does this interpretation of the episode amaze? It is that which our poet gives of it. Distrust, and only that, impelled this lady to the action which, till Browning treated it, had been regarded as a prize-bloom indeed, but the flower not of distrust, but its antithesis--vanity! All the world knows the story; all the world, till this apologist arrived, condemned alone the lady. Like Francis I, each had cried: ". . . 'Twas mere vanity, Not love, set that task to humanity!"