ployed the sequence form; almost the only instance,
indeed, in which he has structurally varied his metre in the course of a
poem.

_James Lee's Wife_ is written in the form of soliloquy, or reflection.
In two other poems, closely allied to it in sentiment, _The Worst of it_
and _Too Late_, intense feeling expresses itself, though in solitude, as
if the object of emotion were present; each is, in great part, a mental
appeal to some one loved and lost. In _James Lee's Wife_ a woman was the
speaker, and the burden of her lament was mere estrangement. _The Worst
of it_ and _Too Late_ are both spoken by men. The former is the
utterance of a man whose wife has been false to him; the latter of a man
whose loved one is dead. But in each case the situation is further
complicated. The woman over whose loss of virtue her forsaken husband
mourns with passionate anguish and unavailing bitterness of regret, has
been to him, whom she now leaves for another, an image of purity: her
love and influence have lifted him from the mire, and "the Worst of it,"
the last pang which he cannot nerve himself to endure, is the knowledge
that she had saved him, and, partly at least through him, ruined
herself. The poem is one of the most passionate and direct of Browning's
dramatic lyrics: it is thrillingly intense and alive; and the swift
force and tremulous eagerness of its very original rhythm and metre
translate its sense into sound with perfect fitness. Similar in cadence,
though different in arrangement, is the measure of _Too Late_, with its
singularly constructed stanza of two quatrains, followed respectively by
two couplets, which together made another quatrain. It is worth noticing
how admirably and uniformly Browning contrives to connect, in sound, the
two halves of the broken quatrains, placing them so as to complete each
other, and relieve our ear of the sense of distance. The poem is spoken
by a lover who was neither rejected nor accepted: like the lover of
Evelyn Hope, he never told his love. His Edith married another, a
heartless and soulless lay-figure of a poet (or so at least his rival
regards him), and now she is dead. His vague but vivid hopes of some
future chance to love her and be loved; the dull rebellion of rashly
reasoning sorrow; the remembrance, the repentance, the regret; are all
poured out with pathetic naturalness.

These three poems are soliloquies; _Dis aliter Visum; or, Le Byron de
nos Jours_, a poem closely akin