? . . . The wrong that has been done to Browning by
his too-subtle "interpreters" is, in my view, incalculable. Always he
must be, for them, the teacher. But he is the _poet_! He "sings,
riding's a joy"--and such joy brings hope along with it, hope for the
"obvious human bliss." People seem to forget that it was Browning who
made that phrase[289:1]--which might almost be his protest against the
transcendentalists.

Much of his finest work has been thus falsified, thus strained to
meanings so "profound" as to be none at all. Mr. Nettleship's gloss upon
this stanza of _The Last Ride_ is a case in point. "[The lover] buoys
himself with the hope that the highest bliss _may_ be the change from
the minute's joy to an eternal fulfilment of joy." Does this mean
anything? And if it did, does that stanza mean _it_? I declare that it
means nothing, and that the stanza means what instinctively (I feel and
know) each reader, reading it--not "studying" it--accepts as its best
meaning: the human one, the true following of the so subtly-induced
mood. And that is, simply, the invigoration, the joy, of riding; and the
hope which comes along with that invigoration and that joy.

+ + + + +

In the strange _Numpholeptos_ we find, by implication, the heart of
Browning's "message" for women. "The nympholepts of old," explains Mr.
Augustine Birrell in one of the volumes of _Obiter Dicta_, "were those
unfortunates who, whilst carelessly strolling among sylvan shades,
caught a hasty glimpse of some spiritual inmate of the woods, in whose
pursuit their whole lives were ever afterwards fruitlessly spent."

The man here has fallen in love with "an angelically pure and inhumanly
cold woman, who requires in him an unattainable union of immaculate
purity and complete experience of life."[290:1]

She does not reject his love, but will wholly accept it only on these
impossible terms. Herself dwells in some "magic hall" whence ray forth
shafts of coloured light--crimson, purple, yellow; and along these
shafts, which symbolise experience, her lover is to travel--coming back
to her at close of each wayfaring, for the rays end before her feet,
beneath her eyes and smile, as they began. He goes forth in obedience;
he comes back. Ever the issue is the same: he comes back smirched. And
she--forgives him, but not loves him.

"What means the sad slow silver smile above
My clay but pity, pardon?--at the best
Bu