The poet frequently expresses a doubt of man's power to be faithful to the letter in case of a wife's death. "Any wife to any husband" reveals that feeling as it comes to a woman. The poet's answer to this doubt is invariably, that where the love was true other attraction is a makeshift by which a desolate life is made tolerable, or, as in "Fifine at the Fair," an ephemeral indulgence in pleasure which does not touch the reality of the spiritual love. Browning was well aware that the ordinary woman had a stronger sense of the eternal in love than the ordinary man. In relation to the Duke in the poem previously mentioned he remarks: "One leans to like the duke, too; up we'll patch Some sort of saintship for him--not to match Hers--but man's best and woman's worst amount So nearly to the same thing, that we count In man a miracle of faithfulness If, while unfaithful somewhat, he lay stress On the main fact that love, when love indeed, Is wholly solely love from first to last-- Truth--all the rest a lie." It may be said that all this is the romantic love about which the poets have always sung, and has as much existence in real life as the ideal of disinterested helpfulness to lovelorn damsels sung about in the days of chivalry. True, others have sung of the exaltation and the immortality of love, and few have been those who have found it, but nowhere has the distinctively human side been touched with such reverence as in Browning. It is not Beatrice translated into a divine personage to be adored by a worshipping devotee, but a wholly human woman who loves and is loved, who touches divinity in Browning's mind. Human love is then not an impossible ideal of which he writes in poetic language existing only in the realm of fancy; it is a living religion, bringing those who love nearer to God through the exaltation of their feeling than any other revelation of the human soul. Other states of consciousness reveal to humanity the existence of the absolute, but this gives a premonition of what divine love may have in store for the aspiring soul. In holding to such an ideal of love as this Browning has ranged himself entirely apart from the main tendencies of thought of the century, on the relations of men and women, which have, on the one hand, been wholly conventional, marriage being a contract under the law binding for life except in cases of definite breaches of conduct, and under the Church of affection which is binding only for life; and have, on the other hand, gone extreme lengths in the advocacy of entire freedom in the relations of the sexes. The first degrades love by making it too much a matter of law, the second by making it an ephemeral passion from which almost everything truly beautiful in the relationship of two human beings is, of necessity, eliminated.