". . . I--forgive not, But bless you, Thorold, from my soul of souls! There! Do not think too much upon the past! The cloud that's broke was all the same a cloud While it stood up between my friend and you; You hurt him 'neath its shadow: but is that So past retrieve? I have his heart, you know; I may dispose of it: I give it you! It loves you as mine loves!" True, she is to die, and so is to rejoin her lover; but, thus rejoined, will "blots upon the 'scutcheon" seem to them the all-sufficient claim for Thorold's deed--Thorold who dies with these words on his lips: ". . . You hold our 'scutcheon up. Austin, no blot on it! You see how blood Must wash one blot away; the first blot came And the first blood came. To the vain world's eye All's gules again: no care to the vain world From whence the red was drawn!" And on Austin's cry that "no blot shall come!" he answers: "I said that: yet it did come. Should it come, Vengeance is God's, not man's. Remember me!" _Vengeance_: how do they who are met again in the spirit-world regard that word, that "God"? FOOTNOTES: [90:1] Berdoe. _Browning Cyclopaedia._ IV BALAUSTION IN "BALAUSTION'S ADVENTURE" AND "ARISTOPHANES' APOLOGY" To me, Balaustion is the queen of Browning's women--nay, I am tempted to proclaim her queen of every poet's women. For in her meet all lovelinesses, and to make her dearer still, some are as yet but in germ (what a mother she will be, for example); so that we have, with all the other beauties, the sense of the unfolding rose--"enmisted by the scent it makes," in a phrase of her creator's which, though in the actual context it does not refer to her, yet exquisitely conveys her influence on these two works. "Rosy Balaustion": she is that, as well as "superb, statuesque," in the admiring apostrophes from Aristophanes, during the long, close argument of the _Apology_. In that piece, the Bald Bard himself is made to show her to us; and though it follows, not precedes, the _Adventure_, I shall steal from him at once, presenting in his lyric phrases our queen before we crown her. He comes to her home in Athens on the night when Balaustion learns that her adored Euripides is dead. She and her husband, Euthukles, are "sitting silent in the house, yet cheerless hardly," musing on the tidings, when suddenly there come torch-light and knocking at the door, and cries and laughter: "Open, open, Bacchos[94:1] bids!"--and, heralded by his chorus and the dancers, flute-boys, all the "banquet-band," there enters, "stands in person, Aristophanes." Balaustion had never seen him till that moment, nor he her: "Forward he stepped: I rose and fronted him"; and as thus for the first time they meet, he breaks into a paean of admiration: