of her capacity; but her nature was, instinctively, less outspoken and truthful than Norbert’s, more subtle, more reasoning.  At the critical moment she is seized by a whirl of emotions, and, with very feminine but singularly unloverlike instinct, she resolves, as she would phrase it, to sacrifice herself, not seeing that she is insulting her lover by the very notion of his accepting such a sacrifice.  Her character has not the pure and steadfast nobility of Norbert’s, but it has the capacity of devotion, and it is genuinely human.  The Queen, unlike Constance, but like Norbert, is simple and single in nature.  She is a tragic and intense figure, at once pathetic and terrible.  I am not aware that the peculiarly pregnant motive:  the hidden longing for love in a starved and stunted nature, clogged with restrictions of state and ceremony, harassed and hampered by circumstances and by the weight of advancing years; the passionate longing suddenly met, as it seems, with reward, and breaking out into a great flame of love and ardour, only to be rudely and finally quenched:  I am not aware that this motive has ever elsewhere been worked out in dramatic poetry.  As here developed, it is among the great situations in literature.

The verse in which this little tragedy is written has, perhaps, more flexibility than that of any of the formal dramas.  It has a strong and fine harmony, a weight and measure, and above all that pungent naturalness which belongs to the period of Andrea del Sarto and the other great monologues.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 29:  The picture which Lippo promises to paint (ll. 347-389) is an exact description of his Coronation of the Virgin, in the Accademia delle Belle Arti at Florence.]

[Footnote 30:  Mrs Foster’s translation (Bohn).]

[Footnote 31:  Baldassarre Galuppi, surnamed Buranello (1706-1785), was a Venetian composer of some distinction.  “He was an immensely prolific composer,” says Vernon Lee, “and abounded in melody, tender, pathetic, brilliant, which in its extreme simplicity and slightness occasionally rose to the highest beauty.”—­Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, p. 101.]

[Footnote 32:  Handbook, p. 266.  The poem was written at Paris, January 3, 1852.]

[Footnote 33:  Mrs Orr, Handbook, p. 201.]

[Footnote 34:  The poem was suggested by the opening of the third ode of the third Book of Horace:  “Justum et tenacem propositi virum.”]

[Footnote 35:  It will be more convenient to treat In a Balcony in a separate section than under the general heading of Men and Women, for it is, to all intents and purposes, an independent work of another order.]

16.  DRAMATIS PERSONAE.

    [Published in 1864 (Poetical Works, 1889, Vol.  VII., pp.
    43-255).]