[Footnote 40:  The second section of James Lee’s Wife, By the Fireside, cannot have been written without a conscious, and therefore a purposed and significant, reference to the like-named poem in Men and Women, which so exquisitely plays with the intimate scenery of his home-life.]

As her problem is another life-setting of his, so she feels her way towards its solution through processes which cannot have been strange to him.  She walks “along the Beach,” or “on the Cliff,” or “among the rocks,” and the voices of sea and wind ("Such a soft sea and such a mournful wind!” he wrote to Miss Blagden) become speaking symbols in her preoccupied mind.  Not at all, however, in the fashion of the “pathetic fallacy.”  She is too deeply disenchanted to imagine pity; and Browning puts into her mouth (part vi.) a significant criticism of some early stanzas of his own, in which he had in a buoyant optimistic fashion interpreted the wailing of the wind.[41] If Nature has aught to teach, it is the sterner doctrine, that nothing endures; that Love, like the genial sunlight, has to glorify base things, to raise the low nature by its throes, sometimes divining the hidden spark of God in what seemed mere earth, sometimes only lending its transient splendour to a dead and barren spirit,—­the fiery grace of a butterfly momentarily obliterating the dull turf or rock it lights on, but leaving them precisely what they were.

[Footnote 41:  Cf. supra, p. 16.]

James Lee’s Wife is a type of the other idyls of love which form so large a part of the Dramatis Personae.  The note of dissonance, of loss, which they sound had been struck by Browning before, but never with the same persistence and iteration.  The Dramatic Lyrics and Men and Women are not quite silent of the tragic failure of love; but it is touched lightly in “swallow flights of song,” like the Lost Mistress, that “dip their wings in tears and skim away.”  And the lovers are spiritual athletes, who can live on the memory of a look, and seem to be only irradiated, not scorched, by the tragic flame.  But these lovers of the ’Sixties are of less aetherial temper; they are more obviously, familiarly human; the loss of what they love comes home to them, and there is agony in the purifying fire.  Such are the wronged husband in The Worst of It, and the finally frustrated lover in Too Late.  In the group of “Might-have-been” lyrics the sense of loss is less poignant and tragic but equally uncompensated.  “You fool!” cries the homely little heroine of Dis Aliter Visum to the elderly scholar who ten years before had failed to propose to her,—­

          “You fool for all your lore!... 
      The devil laughed at you in his sleeve! 
      You knew not?  That I well believe;
      Or you had saved two souls;—­nay, four.”

Nor is there much of the glory of failure in Kate Brown’s bitter smile, as she sums up the story of Youth and Art:—­