ours are past.
"The flesh must live, but why should not the spirit have its dues also?"

"RESPECTABILITY" is a comment on the price paid for social position. A
pair of lovers have been enjoying a harmless escapade; and one remarks
to the other that, if their relation had been recognized by the world,
they might have wasted their youth in the midst of proprieties which
they would never have learned the danger and the pleasure of infringing.
The situation is barely sketched in; but the sentiment of the poem is
well marked, and connects it with the foregoing group.

"A LIGHT WOMAN," "DIS ALITER VISUM," and "BIFURCATION" raise questions
of conduct.

A man desires to extricate his friend from the toils of "A LIGHT WOMAN;"
and to this end he courts her himself. He is older and more renowned
than her present victim, and trusts to her vanity to ensure his success.

But his attentions arouse in her something more. He discovers too late
that he has won her heart. He can only cast it away, and a question
therefore arises: he knows how he appears to his friend; he knows how he
will appear to the woman whom his friend loved; "how does he appear to
himself?" In other words, did the end for which he has acted justify the
means employed? He doubts it.

"DIS ALITER VISUM" records the verdict of later days on a decision which
recommended itself at the time: that is, to the person who formed it. A
man and woman are attracted towards each other, though she is young and
unformed; he, old in years and in experience; and he is, or seems to be,
on the point of offering her his hand. But caution checks the impulse.
They drift asunder. He forms a connection with an opera-dancer. She
makes a loveless marriage. Ten years later they meet again; and she
reminds him of what passed between them, and taxes him with the ruin of
four souls. He has thought only of the drawbacks to _present_ enjoyment,
which the unequal union would have involved; he never thought or cared
how its bitter-sweetness might quicken the striving for eternity.

This criticism reflects the woman's point of view, and was probably
intended to justify it. It does not follow that the author would not, in
another dramatic mood, have justified the man, in his more practical
estimate of the situation. Mr. Browning's poetic self is, however,
expressed in the woman's belief: that everything which disturbs the
equal balance of human life gives a vital impulse to the soul. The
st