Did you love me once? 
    Then take love’s last and best return!  I think
    Womanliness means only motherhood;
    All love begins and ends there,—­roams enough,
    But, having run the circle, rests at home.

Her husband, good man, will not suffer acutely for her loss; he will be true to duty, and continue to dose his flock with the comfortable dogma of hell-fire, in which not one of them believes.

The Pacchiarotto volume of 1876 was the first collection of miscellaneous poetry put forth by Browning since the appearance, twelve years previously, of Dramatis Personae[117] There is, of course, throughout the whole the presence of a vigorous personality; we can in an occasional mood tumble and toss even in the rough verse of Pacchiarotto, as we do on a choppy sea on which the sun is a-shine, and which invigorates while it—­not always agreeably—­bobs our head, and dashes down our throat.  But vigour alone does not produce poetry, and it may easily run into a kind of good-humoured effrontery.  The speciality of the volume as compared with its predecessors is that it contains not a little running comment by Browning upon himself and his own work, together with a jocular-savage reply to his unfriendly critics.  There is a little too much in all this of the robustious Herakles sending his great voice before him.  An author ought to be aware of the fact that no pledge to admire him and his writings has been administered to every one who enters the world, and that as sure as he attracts, so surely must he repel.  In the Epilogue the poet informs his readers that those who expect from him, or from any poet, strong wine of verse which is also sweet demand the impossible.  Sweet the strong wine can become only after it has long lain mellowing in the cask.  The experience of Browning’s readers contradicted the assertion.  Some who drank the good wines of 1855 and of 1864 in the year of the vintages found that they were strong and needed no keeping to be sweet.  Wine-tasters must make distinctions, and the quality of the yield of 1876 does not entitle it to be remembered as an extraordinary year.

The poem from which the volume was named tells in verse, “timed by raps of the knuckle,” how the painter Pacchiarotto must needs become a world-reformer, or at least a city-reformer in his distressed Siena, with no good results for his city and with disastrous results for himself.  He learns by unsavoury experience his lesson, to hold on by the paint-brush and maul-stick, and do his own work, accepting the mingled evil and good of life in a spirit of strenuous—­not indolent—­laissez-faire, playing, as energetically as a human being can, his own part, and leaving others to play theirs, assured that for all and each this life is the trial-time and test of eternity, the rehearsal for the performance in a future world, and “Things rarely go smooth at Rehearsal.”  Browning’s joy in difficult rhyming as seen in