“A WOMAN’S LAST WORD.

      I.

      Let’s contend no more, Love,
        Strive nor weep: 
      All be as before, Love,
       —­Only sleep!

      II.

      What so wild as words are? 
        I and thou
      In debate, as birds are,
        Hawk on bough!

      III.

      See the creature stalking
        While we speak! 
      Hush and hide the talking,
        Cheek on cheek!

      IV.

      What so false as truth is,
        False to thee? 
      Where the serpent’s tooth is,
        Shun the tree—­

      V.

      Where the apple reddens
        Never pry—­
      Lest we lose our Edens,
        Eve and I.

      VI.

      Be a god and hold me
        With a charm! 
      Be a man and fold me
        With thine arm!

      VII.

      Teach me, only teach, Love! 
        As I ought
      I will speak thy speech, Love,
        Think thy thought—­

      VIII.

      Meet, if thou require it,
        Both demands,
      Laying flesh and spirit
        In thy hands.

      IX.

      That shall be to-morrow
        Not to-night: 
      I must bury sorrow
        Out of sight: 

      X.

      —­Must a little weep, Love,
        (Foolish me!)
      And so fall asleep, Love,
        Loved by thee.”

Any Wife to any Husband is the grave and mournful lament of a dying woman, addressed to the husband whose love has never wavered throughout her life, but whose faithlessness to her memory she foresees.  The situation is novel in poetry, and it is realised with an intense sympathy and depth of feeling.  The tone of dignified sadness in the woman’s words, never passionate or pleading, only confirmed and hopeless, is admirably rendered in the slow and solemn metre, whose firm smoothness and regularity translate into sound the sentiment of the speech. A Serenade at the Villa, which expresses a hopeless love from the man’s side, has a special picturesqueness, and something more than picturesqueness:  nature and life are seen in throbbing sympathy.  The little touches of description give one the very sense of the hot thundrous summer night as it “sultrily suspires” in sympathy with the disconsolate lover at his fruitless serenading.  I can scarcely doubt that this poem (some of which has been quoted on p. 25 above), was suggested by one of the songs in Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, a poem on the same subject in the same rare metre:—­

“Who is it that this dark night
Underneath my window plaineth? 
It is one who from thy sight
Being, ah! exiled, disdaineth
Every other vulgar light.”

If Browning’s love-poems have any model or anticipation in English poetry, it is certainly in the love-songs of Sidney, in what Browning himself has called,