one's impulse surely is (mine is) to ask with some vexation what "this" was? "Each life's unfulfilled, you see; It hangs still, patchy and scrappy; We have not sighed deep, laughed free, Starved, feasted, despaired--been happy." Away from its irritating context, that stanza _is_ delightful; with the context it is to me wholly meaningless. The boy and girl had not fallen in love--there is no more to say; and I heartily wish that Browning had not tried to say it. The whole lyric is based on nothingness, or else on a self-consciousness peculiarly unappealing. Kate Brown was evidently quite "safe in her corset-lacing" before she put up a blind. I fear that this confession of my dislike for _Youth and Art_ is a betrayal of lacking humour; I can but face it out, and say that unhumorous is precisely what, despite its levity of manner, rhythm, and rhyme, _Youth and Art_ seems to my sense. . . . I rejoice that we need not reckon this Kate among Browning's girls; she is introduced to us as married to her rich old lord, and queen of _bals-pares_. Thus we may console ourselves with the hope that life has vulgarised her, and that as a girl she was far less objectionable than she now represents herself to have been. We have only to imagine Evelyn Hope putting up a superfluous blind that she might be safe in her corset-lacing, to sweep the gamut of Kate Brown's commonness. . . . Let us remove her from a list which now offers us a figure more definitely and dramatically posed than any of those whom we have yet considered. FOOTNOTES: [12:1] Mr. Chesterton and Mrs. Orr both speak of Kate Brown as having succeeded in her art. I cannot find any words in the poem which justify this view. She is "queen at _bals-pares_," and she has married "a rich old lord," but nothing in either condition predicates the successful cantatrice. I THE GIRL IN "COUNT GISMOND" It is like a fairy tale, for there are three beautiful princesses, and the youngest is the heroine. The setting is French--a castle in Aix-en-Provence; it is the fourteenth century, for tourneys and hawking-parties are the amusements, and a birthday is celebrated by an award of crowns to the victors in the lists, when there are ladies in brave attire, thrones, canopies, false knight and true knight. . . . Here is the story.