re has aught to teach,
it is the sterner doctrine, that nothing endures; that Love, like the
genial sunlight, has to glorify base things, to raise the low nature by
its throes, sometimes divining the hidden spark of God in what seemed
mere earth, sometimes only lending its transient splendour to a dead and
barren spirit,--the fiery grace of a butterfly momentarily obliterating
the dull turf or rock it lights on, but leaving them precisely what they
were.

[Footnote 41: Cf. _supra_, p. 16.]

_James Lee's Wife_ is a type of the other idyls of love which form so
large a part of the _Dramatis Personae_. The note of dissonance, of loss,
which they sound had been struck by Browning before, but never with the
same persistence and iteration. The _Dramatic Lyrics_ and _Men and
Women_ are not quite silent of the tragic failure of love; but it is
touched lightly in "swallow flights of song," like the _Lost Mistress_,
that "dip their wings in tears and skim away." And the lovers are
spiritual athletes, who can live on the memory of a look, and seem to be
only irradiated, not scorched, by the tragic flame. But these lovers of
the 'Sixties are of less aetherial temper; they are more obviously,
familiarly human; the loss of what they love comes home to them, and
there is agony in the purifying fire. Such are the wronged husband in
_The Worst of It_, and the finally frustrated lover in _Too Late_. In
the group of "Might-have-been" lyrics the sense of loss is less poignant
and tragic but equally uncompensated. "You fool!" cries the homely
little heroine of _Dis Aliter Visum_ to the elderly scholar who ten
years before had failed to propose to her,--

"You fool for all your lore!...
The devil laughed at you in his sleeve!
You knew not? That I well believe;
Or you had saved two souls;--nay, four."

Nor is there much of the glory of failure in Kate Brown's bitter smile,
as she sums up the story of Youth and Art:--

"Each life unfulfilled, you see;
It hangs still, patchy and scrappy,
We have not sighed deep, laughed free,
Starved, feasted, despaired,--been happy."

It is no accident that with the clearer recognition of sharp and
absolute loss Browning shows increasing preoccupation with the thought
of recovery after death. For himself death was now inseparably
intertwined with all that he had known of love, and the prospect of the
supreme reunion which death, as he believed, wa