her action to be one of self-sacrifice, but the thing, as he went on, was taken out of his hands, and turns out to be quite a different matter.  The woman really leaves her husband because her love for him was tired out.  She talks of leaving her husband free, and perhaps, in women’s way, persuades herself that she is sacrificing herself; but she desires in reality to set herself free from an unavailing struggle to keep his love.  There comes a time when the striving for love wearies out love itself.  And James Lee’s wife had reached that moment.  Her departure, thus explained, is the most womanly thing in the poem, and I should not wonder if Browning meant it so.  He knew what self-sacrifice really was, and this departure of the woman was not a true self-sacrifice.

Another of these poems in which a woman speaks out her heart is Any Wife to any Husband.  She is dying, and she would fain claim his undying fidelity to his love of her; but though she believes in his love, she thinks, when her presence is not with him, that his nature will be drawn towards other women.  Then what he brings her, when he meets her again, will not be perfect.  Womanly to the core, and her nature is a beautiful nature, she says nothing which is not kind and true, and the picture she draws of faithfulness, without one stain of wavering, is natural and lovely.  But, for all that, it is jealousy that speaks, the desire to claim all for one’s self.  “Thou art mine, and mine only”—­that fine selfishness which injures love so deeply in the end, because it forbids its expansion, that is, forbids the essential nature of love to act.  That may be pardoned, unless in its extremes, during life, if the pardon does not increase it; but this is in the hour of death, and it is unworthy of the higher world.  To carry jealousy beyond the grave is a phase of that selfish passion over which this hour, touched by the larger thought of the infinite world, should have uplifted the woman.  Still, what she says is in nature, and Browning’s imagination has closed passionately round his subject.  But he has left us with pity for the woman rather than with admiration of her.

Perhaps the subtlest part of the poem is the impression left on us that the woman knows all her pleading will be in vain, that she has fathomed the weakness of her husband’s character.  He will not like to remember that knowledge of hers; and her letting him feel it is a kind of vengeance which will not help him to be faithful.  It is also her worst bitterness, but if her womanhood were perfect, she would not have had that bitterness.

In these two poems, and in others, there is to be detected the deep-seated and quiet half-contempt—­contempt which does not damage love, contempt which is half pity—­which a woman who loves a man has for his weakness under passion or weariness.  Both the wives in these poems feel that their husbands are inferior to themselves in strength of character and of intellect.  To feel this is common enough in women, but is rarely confessed by them.  A man scarcely ever finds it out from his own observation; he is too vain for that.  But Browning knew it.  A poet sees many things, and perhaps his wife told him this secret.  It was like his audacity to express it.