lk on the edge of the low rocks by the sea for miles.... If I could I
would stay just as I am for many a day. I feel out of the very earth
sometimes as I sit here at the window." The wild coast scenery falls in
with the desolate mood of James Lee's wife; the savage luxuriance of the
Isle with the primitive fancies of Caliban; the arid desert holds in
its embrace, like an oasis, the well-spring of Love which flows from the
lips of the dying Apostle. In the poetry of _Men and Women_ we see the
ripe corn and the flowers in bloom; in _Dramatis Personae_, the processes
of Nature are less spontaneous and, as it were, less complete; the
desert and the abounding streams, the unreclaimed human nature and the
fertilising grace of love, emerge in a nearer approach to elemental
nakedness, and there are moods in which each appears to dominate.
Doubtless the mood which finally triumphed was that of the dying John
and of the Third Speaker; but it was a triumph no longer won by "the
happy prompt instinctive way of youth," and the way to it lay through
moods not unlike those of James Lee's wife, whose problem, like his own,
was how to live when the answering love was gone. His "fire," like hers,
was made "of shipwreck wood",[40] and her words "at the window" can only
be an echo of his--

"Ah, Love! but a day
And the world has changed!
The sun's away,
And the bird estranged;
The wind has dropped,
And the sky's deranged:
Summer has stopped."

[Footnote 40: The second section of _James Lee's Wife, By the Fireside_,
cannot have been written without a conscious, and therefore a purposed
and significant, reference to the like-named poem in _Men and Women_,
which so exquisitely plays with the intimate scenery of his home-life.]

As her problem is another life-setting of his, so she feels her way
towards its solution through processes which cannot have been strange to
him. She walks "along the Beach," or "on the Cliff," or "among the
rocks," and the voices of sea and wind ("Such a soft sea and such a
mournful wind!" he wrote to Miss Blagden) become speaking symbols in her
preoccupied mind. Not at all, however, in the fashion of the "pathetic
fallacy." She is too deeply disenchanted to imagine pity; and Browning
puts into her mouth (part vi.) a significant criticism of some early
stanzas of his own, in which he had in a buoyant optimistic fashion
interpreted the wailing of the wind.[41] If Natu