Something is there to which not again, not once again, did Browning stoop; and that something removes, for me, all difficulty in understanding his rejection, despite its exquisite verbal beauties, of this work. Moreover, it is interesting to observe the queer sub-conscious sense of the lover's inferiority betrayed in the prose note at the end. This is in French, and feigns to be written by Pauline herself. She is there made to speak of "_mon pauvre ami_." Let any woman ask herself what that phrase implies, when used by her in speaking of a lover--"my poor dear friend"! We cannot of course be sure that Browning, as a man, was versed in this scrap of feminine psychology; but we do gather with certainty from Pauline's fabled comment that her view of the confession--for the poem is merely, as Mr. Chesterton says, "the typical confession of a boy"--was very much less lachrymose than that of _mon pauvre ami_. Unconsciously, then, here--but in another poem soon to be discussed, not unconsciously--there sounds the humorous note in regard to men which dominates so many of women's relations with them. "The big child"--to some women, as we all know, man presents himself in that aspect chiefly. Pauline, remarking of her lover's "idea" that it was perhaps as unintelligible to him as to her, is a tender exponent of this view; the girl in _Youth and Art_ is gayer and more ironic. Here we have a woman, successful though (as I read the poem)[12:1] _not_ famous, recalling to a successful and famous sculptor the days when they lived opposite one another--she as a young student of singing, he as a budding statuary-- "We studied hard in our styles, Chipped each at a crust like Hindoos, For air looked out on the tiles, For fun watched each other's windows. * * * * * And I--soon managed to find Weak points in the flower-fence facing, Was forced to put up a blind And be safe in my corset-lacing. * * * * * No harm! It was not my fault If you never turned your eyes' tail up As I shook upon E in alt, Or ran the chromatic scale up. * * * * * Why did you not pinch a flower In a pellet of clay and fling it? Why did I not put a power Of thanks in a look, or sing it?" * * * * * I confess that this lyric, except for its penultimate verse, soon to be quoted, does not seem to me what Mr. Chesterton calls it--"delightful." Nothing, plainly, did bring these two together; she may have looked jealously at his models, and he at her piano-tuner (though even this, so far as "he" is concerned, I question), but they remained uninterested in one another--and why should they not? When at the end she cries-- "This could but have happened once, And we missed it, lost it for ever"--