she would not take--but she shall take
it now! He will "slake thirst at her presence" by pouring it away, by
drinking it down with her, as long ago he yearned to do. Edith needs
help in her grave and finds none near--wants warmth from his heart? He
sends it--so.

+ + + + +

Assuredly this is the meaning; yet none of the commentators says so. She
was the man's whole life, and she has died. Then he dies too, that he
may live.

"There are two who decline, a woman and I,
And enjoy our death in the darkness here."

Yet even in this we have no sense of failure, of "giving-in": it is for
intenser life that he dies, and she shall be his queen "while his soul
endures."

This is the last of my "women unwon." In none of all these poems does
courage fail; love is ever God's secret. It comes and goes: the heart
has had its moment. It does not come at all: the heart has known the
loved one's loveliness. It has but hoped to come: the heart hoped with
it. It has set a price upon itself, a cruel crushing price: the heart
will pay it, if it can be paid. It has waked too late--it calls from the
grave: the heart will follow it there. No love is in vain:

"For God above creates the love to reward the love."

FOOTNOTES:

[277:1] He excepts, of course, all through this passage, _Any Wife to
any Husband_--a poem which has not fallen into my scheme.

[285:1] No line which Browning has written is more characteristic than
this--nor more famous.

[289:1] In _By the Fireside_.

[290:1] Arthur Symons, _Introduction to the Study of Browning_, p. 198.

[291:1] Browning himself, asked by Dr. Furnivall, on behalf of the
Browning Society, to explain this allusion, answered in the fashion
which he often loved to use towards such inquirers: "The 'seven spirits'
are in the Apocalypse, also in Coleridge and Byron, a common
image." . . . "I certainly never intended" (he also said) "to personify
wisdom, or philosophy, or any other abstraction." And he summed up the,
after all, sufficiently obvious meaning by saying that _Numpholeptos_ is
"an allegory of an impossible ideal object of love, accepted
conventionally as such by a man who all the while" (as I have once or
twice had occasion to say of himself!) "cannot quite blind himself to
the fact that" (to put it more concisely than he) knowledge and purity
are best obtained by achievement. Still more concisely:
"Innocence--sin--virtue"--in the Heg