ife.

"We take our own method, the devil and I,
With pleasant and fair and wise and rare:
And the best we wish to what lives, is--death."

_She_ is better off; she has committed a fault and has done . . . now
she can begin again. But most likely she does not repent at all, he goes
on to reflect--most likely she is glad she deceived him. She had endured
too long:--

"[You] have done no evil and want no aid,
Will live the old life out and chance the new.
And your sentence is written all the same,
And I can do nothing--pray, perhaps:
But somehow the word pursues its game--
If I pray, if I curse--for better or worse:
And my faith is torn to a thousand scraps,
And my heart feels ice while my words breathe flame.

Dear, I look from my hiding-place.
Are you still so fair? Have you still the eyes?
Be happy! Add but the other grace,
Be good! Why want what the angels vaunt?
I knew you once: but in Paradise,
If we meet, I will pass nor turn my face."

I think the saddest thing in this poem is its last stanza; for we feel,
do we not? that _now_ she is having her first opportunity to be both
happy and good--free from the intolerable magnanimity of this husband.
And so, by making a male utterance too "noble," Browning has almost
redressed the balance. The tear had been too frequently assigned to
woman; exultation too often had sounded from man. We have seen that many
of the feminine "tears" were supererogatory; and now, in this chapter of
the Woman Won, we see that she can tap the source of those salt drops in
man. But not in _James Lee's Wife_ is the top-note of magnanimity more
strained than in _The Worst of It_. Moral gymnastics should not be
practised at the expense of others. No one knew that better than
Browning, but too often he allowed his subtle intellect to confute his
warm, wise heart--too often he fell to the lure of "situation," and
forgot the truth. "A man and woman _might_ feel so," he sometimes seems
to have said; "it does not matter that no man and woman ever have so
felt."

And thus, now and then, he gave both men and women--the worst of it. But
oftener he gave them such a best of it that I hardly can imagine a
reader of Browning who has not love and courage in the heart, and trust
and looking-forward in the soul; who does not, in the words of the great
Epilogue:--

"Greet the unseen with a cheer."