Lastly, in the outer periphery of his love poetry belong his rare and fugitive "dreams" of love. _Women and Roses_ has an intoxicating swiftness and buoyancy of music. But there is another and more sinister kind of love-dream--the dream of an unloved woman. Such a dream, with its tragic disillusion, Browning painted in his poignant and original _In a Balcony_. It is in no sense a drama, but a dramatic incident in three scenes, affecting the fates of three persons, upon whom the entire interest is concentrated. The three vivid and impressive character-heads stand out with intense and minute brilliance from a background absolutely blank and void. Though the scene is laid in a court and the heroine is a queen, there is no bustle of political intrigue, no conflict between the rival attractions of love and power, as in _Colombe's Birthday_. Love is the absorbing preoccupation of this society, the ultimate ground of all undertakings. There is vague talk of diplomatic victories, of dominions annexed, of public thanksgivings; but the statesman who has achieved all this did it all to win the hand of a girl, and the aged queen whom he has so successfully served has secretly dreamed all the time, though already wedded, of being his. For a brilliant young minister to fail to make love to his sovereign, in spite of her grey hairs and the marriage law, is a kind of high treason. In its social presuppositions this community belongs to a world as visionary as the mystic dream-politics of M. Maeterlinck. But, those presuppositions granted, everything in it has the uncompromising clearness and persuasive reality that Browning invariably communicates to his dreams. The three figures who in a few hours taste the height of ecstasy and then the bitterness of disillusion or severance, are drawn with remarkable psychologic force and truth. For all three love is the absorbing passion, the most real thing in life, scornfully contrasted with the reflected joys of the painter or the poet. Norbert's noble integrity is of a kind which mingles in duplicity and intrigue with disastrous results; he is too invincibly true to himself easily to act a part; but he can control the secret hunger of his heart and give no sign, until the consummate hour arrives when he may "resume Life after death (it is no less than life, After such long unlovely labouring days) And liberate to beauty life's great need O' the beautiful, which, while it prompted work, Suppress'd itself erewhile." In the ecstasy of release from that suppression, every tree and flower seems to be an embodiment of the harmonious freedom he had so long foregone, as Wordsworth, chafing under his unchartered freedom, saw everywhere the willing submission to Duty. Even