m:

"Would he loved me yet,
On and on,
While I found some way undreamed
--Paid my debt!
Gave more life and more,
Till, all gone,
He should smile, 'She never seemed
Mine before.'"

But this will not be; in a year it is over for him; and for her "over"
too, though not yet ended. How will it end for her?

"Well, this cold clay clod
Was man's heart:
Crumble it, and what comes next?
Is it God ?" . . .

The dream, the silly dream, of each forsaken child!

"'Dying for my sake--
White and pink!
Can't we touch these bubbles then
But they break?'"

That is what he will say to himself, in his high male fashion, when he
hears that she is dead; she sits and dreams of it, as women have done
since the world began, and will do till it ends.[239:1]

Then, at last, he will know how she loved him; since, for all that has
been between them, clearly he has not known that yet. . . . Again, the
supreme conviction of our souls that who does know truly _all_ the love,
can never turn away from it. Most pitiful, most deceived, of dreams--yet
after all, perhaps the horn-gate dream, for who knows "truly" but who
loves truly?

Yet indeed (she now muses) _has_ she enough loved him?

"I had wealth and ease,
Beauty, youth:
Since my lover gave me love,
I gave these.

That was all I meant
--To be just,
And the passion I had raised
To content.
Since he chose to change
Gold for dust,
If I gave him what he praised,
Was it strange?"

And after all it was not enough! "Justice" was not enough, the giving of
herself was not enough. If she could try again, if she could find that
"way undreamed" to pay her debt. . . .

I should like to omit two lines from the second of the stanzas quoted
above:

"_And the passion I had raised
To content._"

From Browning, those words come oddly: moreover, elsewhere the girl
cries:

"I, too, at love's brim
Touched the sweet:
I would die if death bequeathed
Sweet to him."

This is more than to "content" the "passion she had raised." Let us
regard that phrase as unwritten: it is not authentic, it does not
express either the girl or her poet.

The rest comes right and true--and more than all, perhaps, the second
verse, where the mystery of passion in its coming no less than in its
going is so s