"He thought to quell the stubborn hearts of oak
Madman!"

as if the defeat of an English regiment were a violation of the laws of
Nature. Mrs. Browning knew no more facts about Napoleon, perhaps, than
Tennyson did; but she knew the truth. Her epigram on Napoleon's fall is
in one line

"And kings crept out again to feel the sun."

Talleyrand would have clapped his horrible old hands at that. Her
instinct about the statesman and the soldier was very like Jane Austen's
instinct for the gentleman and the man. It is not unnoticeable that as
Miss Austen spent most of her life in a village, Miss Barrett spent most
of her life on a sofa. The godlike power of guessing seems (for some
reason I do not understand) to grow under such conditions. Unfortunately
Mrs. Browning was like all the other Victorians in going a little lame,
as I have roughly called it, having one leg shorter than the other. But
her case was, in one sense, extreme. She exaggerated both ways. She was
too strong and too weak, or (as a false sex philosophy would express it)
too masculine and too feminine. I mean that she hit the centre of
weakness with almost the same emphatic precision with which she hit the
centre of strength. She could write finally of the factory wheels
"grinding life down from its mark," a strong and strictly true
observation. Unfortunately she could also write of Euripides "with his
droppings of warm tears." She could write in _A Drama of Exile_, a
really fine exposition, touching the later relation of Adam and the
animals: unfortunately the tears were again turned on at the wrong
moment at the main; and the stage direction commands a silence, only