rrow
Out of sight:

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

He does not wish to know the real Herself. Then the real herself shall
"sleep"; all shall be as before.

+ + + + +

Will this endure? All depends upon the woman: upon how strong _she_ is.
For is not this the sheer denial of her husband's moral force? By her
silence, her abjection, her suppression, he shall prevail: not
otherwise. And so, _if_ this endure, what shall the issue prove? Not the
highest good of married life for either, and still less for the man than
for the woman.

By implication, Browning shows us that in _By the Fireside_, one of his
three great songs of wedded love:

"Oh, I must feel your brain prompt mine,
Your heart anticipate my heart,
You must be just before, in fine,
See and make me see, for your part,
New depths of the divine!"

Once more we can trace there his development from _Pauline_. She,
looking up "as I might kill her and be loved the more," had, to the
lover's thinking, laid her flesh and spirit in his hands, precisely as
the wife in the _Last Word_ resolves to do. . . . As the poet grew, so
grew the man in Browning: we reach _By the Fireside_ from these. For the
woman in the _Last Word_, strong to lay aside herself, to "think his
thought," could with that strength, used otherwise, bring _that_ husband
to the place where stands the man in _By the Fireside_, when the "long
dark autumn evenings" are come, and together with his wife he treads
back the path to their youth, to the "moment, one and infinite" in which
they found each other once for all.

"My perfect wife, my Leonor,
Oh heart, my own, oh eyes, mine too,
Whom else could I dare look backward for,
With whom beside should I dare pursue
The path grey heads abhor?

* * * * *

My own, confirm me! If I tread
This path back, is it not in pride
To think how little I dreamed it led
To an age so blest that, by its side,
Youth seems the waste instead?"

And now read again:

"Meet, _if thou require it_,
Both demands,
Laying flesh and spirit
In thy hands."

A lower note there, is it not? And shall he so require, and she so
yield, that backward-treading path is not for them--never shall _they_
say to one another: