glories of Men and Women.  The world which is neither thrillingly beautiful nor grotesquely ugly, but simply poor, unendowed, humdrum, finds for the first time a place in his poetry.  Its blankness answered too well to the desolate regard which in the early ’Sixties he turned upon life.  The women are homely, even plain, like James Lee’s wife, with her “coarse hands and hair,” and Edith in Too Late, with her thin, odd features, or mediocre, like the speaker in Dis Aliter Visum; and they have homely names, like “Lee” or “Lamb” or “Brown,” not gratuitously grotesque ones like Blougram, Blouphocks, or the outrageous “Gigadibs.”  “Sludge” stands on a different footing; for it is dramatically expressive, as these are not.  The legend of the gold-haired maiden of Pornic is told with a touch of harsher cynicism than was heard in Galuppi’s “chill” music of the vanished beauties of Venice.  If we may by no means say that the glory of humanity has faded for Browning, yet its glory has become more fugitive and more extrinsic,—­a “grace not theirs” brought by love “settling unawares” upon minds “level and low, burnt and bare” in themselves.  And he dwells now on desolate and desert scenes with a new persistence, just as it was wild primitive nooks of the French coast which now became his chosen summer resorts in place of the semi-civic rusticity which had been his choice in Italy.  “This is a wild little place in Brittany,” he wrote to Miss Blagden in August 1863; “close to the sea, a hamlet of a dozen houses, perfectly lonely—­one may walk on the edge of the low rocks by the sea for miles....  If I could I would stay just as I am for many a day.  I feel out of the very earth sometimes as I sit here at the window.”  The wild coast scenery falls in with the desolate mood of James Lee’s wife; the savage luxuriance of the Isle with the primitive fancies of Caliban; the arid desert holds in its embrace, like an oasis, the well-spring of Love which flows from the lips of the dying Apostle.  In the poetry of Men and Women we see the ripe corn and the flowers in bloom; in Dramatis Personae, the processes of Nature are less spontaneous and, as it were, less complete; the desert and the abounding streams, the unreclaimed human nature and the fertilising grace of love, emerge in a nearer approach to elemental nakedness, and there are moods in which each appears to dominate.  Doubtless the mood which finally triumphed was that of the dying John and of the Third Speaker; but it was a triumph no longer won by “the happy prompt instinctive way of youth,” and the way to it lay through moods not unlike those of James Lee’s wife, whose problem, like his own, was how to live when the answering love was gone.  His “fire,” like hers, was made “of shipwreck wood",[40] and her words “at the window” can only be an echo of his—­

     “Ah, Love! but a day
        And the world has changed! 
      The sun’s away,
        And the bird estranged;
      The wind has dropped,
        And the sky’s deranged: 
      Summer has stopped.”