cumstances Browning has made, her thought would have been quite clear
at its root, and indeed in its branches. She is represented as in love
with her husband. Were she really in love, she would not have been so
involved, or able to argue out her life so anxiously. Love or love's
sorrow knows itself at once and altogether, and its cause and aim are
simple. But Browning has unconsciously made the woman clear enough for
us to guess the real cause of her departure. That departure is believed
by some to be a self-sacrifice. There are folk who see self-sacrifice in
everything Browning wrote about women. Browning may have originally
intended her action to be one of self-sacrifice, but the thing, as he
went on, was taken out of his hands, and turns out to be quite a
different matter. The woman really leaves her husband because her love
for him was tired out. She talks of leaving her husband free, and
perhaps, in women's way, persuades herself that she is sacrificing
herself; but she desires in reality to set herself free from an
unavailing struggle to keep his love. There comes a time when the
striving for love wearies out love itself. And James Lee's wife had
reached that moment. Her departure, thus explained, is the most womanly
thing in the poem, and I should not wonder if Browning meant it so. He
knew what self-sacrifice really was, and this departure of the woman was
not a true self-sacrifice.

Another of these poems in which a woman speaks out her heart is _Any
Wife to any Husband_. She is dying, and she would fain claim his undying
fidelity to his love of her; but though she believes in his love, she
thinks, when her presence is not with him, that his nature will be drawn
towards other women. Then what he brings her, when he meets her again,
will not be perfect. Womanly to the core, and her nature is a beautiful
nature, she says nothing which is not kind and true, and the picture she
draws of faithfulness, without one stain of wavering, is natural and
lovely. But, for all that, it is jealousy that speaks, the desire to
claim all for one's self. "Thou art mine, and mine only"--that fine
selfishness which injures love so deeply in the end, because it forbids
its expansion, that is, forbids the essential nature of love to act.
That may be pardoned, unless in its extremes, during life, if the pardon
does not increase it; but this is in the hour of death, and it is
unworthy of the higher world. To carry jealousy beyond the gra