willed it so: he was to track the yellow ray. He pleads once more
her own permission--nay, command! And, as before, she shows

"Scarce recognition, no approval, some
Mistrust, more wonder at a man become
Monstrous in garb, nay--flesh-disguised as well,
Through his adventure."

But she had said that, if he were worthily to retain her love, he must
share the knowledge shrined in her supernal eyes. And this was the one
way for _man_ to gain that knowledge. Well, it is as before:

"I pass into your presence, I receive
Your smile of pity, pardon, and I leave."

But no! This time he will not leave, he will not dumbly bend to his
penance. Hitherto he has trusted her word that the feat can be achieved,
the ray trod to its edge, yet he return unsmirched. He has tried the
experiment--and returned, "absurd as frightful." This is his last word.

". . . No, I say:
No fresh adventure! No more seeking love
At end of toil, and finding, calm above
My passion, the old statuesque regard,
The sad petrific smile!"

And he turns upon her with a violent invective. She is not so much hard
and hateful as mistaken and obtuse.

"You very woman with the pert pretence
To match the male achievement!"

_Who_ could not be victorious when all is made easy, when the rough
effaces itself to smooth, the gruff "grinds down and grows a whisper";
when man's truth subdues its rapier-edge to suit the bulrush spear that
womanly falsehood fights with? Oh woman's ears that will not hear the
truth! oh woman's "thrice-superfine feminity of sense," that ignores, as
by right divine, the process, and takes the spotless result from out the
very muck that made it!

But he breaks off. "Ah me!" he cries,

"The true slave's querulous outbreak!"

And forth again, all slavishly, at her behest he fares. Who knows but
_this_ time the "crimson quest" may deepen to a sunrise, not decay to
that cold sad sweet smile--which he obeys?

+ + + + +

Such a being as this, said Browning himself, "is imaginary, not real; a
nymph and no woman"; but the poem is "an allegory of an impossible ideal
of love, accepted conventionally." _How_ impossible he has shown not
only here but everywhere--_how_ conventionally accepted. This is not
woman's mission! And in the lover's querulous outbreak--the "true
slave's" outbreak--we may read the innermost meaning of