in record, according as the artist is able to mould his material.  Each of the sections shows us a mood, signalized by some slight link of circumstance which may the better enable us to grasp it.  The development of disillusion, the melancholy progress of change, is finely indicated in the successive stages of this lyric sequence, from the first clear strain of believing love (shaken already by a faint tremor of fear), through gradual alienation and inevitable severance, to the final resolved parting.  This poem is worthy of notice as the only one in which Browning has employed the sequence form; almost the only instance, indeed, in which he has structurally varied his metre in the course of a poem.

James Lee’s Wife is written in the form of soliloquy, or reflection.  In two other poems, closely allied to it in sentiment, The Worst of it and Too Late, intense feeling expresses itself, though in solitude, as if the object of emotion were present; each is, in great part, a mental appeal to some one loved and lost.  In James Lee’s Wife a woman was the speaker, and the burden of her lament was mere estrangement. The Worst of it and Too Late are both spoken by men.  The former is the utterance of a man whose wife has been false to him; the latter of a man whose loved one is dead.  But in each case the situation is further complicated.  The woman over whose loss of virtue her forsaken husband mourns with passionate anguish and unavailing bitterness of regret, has been to him, whom she now leaves for another, an image of purity:  her love and influence have lifted him from the mire, and “the Worst of it,” the last pang which he cannot nerve himself to endure, is the knowledge that she had saved him, and, partly at least through him, ruined herself.  The poem is one of the most passionate and direct of Browning’s dramatic lyrics:  it is thrillingly intense and alive; and the swift force and tremulous eagerness of its very original rhythm and metre translate its sense into sound with perfect fitness.  Similar in cadence, though different in arrangement, is the measure of Too Late, with its singularly constructed stanza of two quatrains, followed respectively by two couplets, which together made another quatrain.  It is worth noticing how admirably and uniformly Browning contrives to connect, in sound, the two halves of the broken quatrains, placing them so as to complete each other, and relieve our ear of the sense of distance.  The poem is spoken by a lover who was neither rejected nor accepted:  like the lover of Evelyn Hope, he never told his love.  His Edith married another, a heartless and soulless lay-figure of a poet (or so at least his rival regards him), and now she is dead.  His vague but vivid hopes of some future chance to love her and be loved; the dull rebellion of rashly reasoning sorrow; the remembrance, the repentance, the regret; are all poured out with pathetic naturalness.