Will this endure? All depends upon the woman: upon how strong _she_ is. For is not this the sheer denial of her husband's moral force? By her silence, her abjection, her suppression, he shall prevail: not otherwise. And so, _if_ this endure, what shall the issue prove? Not the highest good of married life for either, and still less for the man than for the woman. By implication, Browning shows us that in _By the Fireside_, one of his three great songs of wedded love: "Oh, I must feel your brain prompt mine, Your heart anticipate my heart, You must be just before, in fine, See and make me see, for your part, New depths of the divine!" Once more we can trace there his development from _Pauline_. She, looking up "as I might kill her and be loved the more," had, to the lover's thinking, laid her flesh and spirit in his hands, precisely as the wife in the _Last Word_ resolves to do. . . . As the poet grew, so grew the man in Browning: we reach _By the Fireside_ from these. For the woman in the _Last Word_, strong to lay aside herself, to "think his thought," could with that strength, used otherwise, bring _that_ husband to the place where stands the man in _By the Fireside_, when the "long dark autumn evenings" are come, and together with his wife he treads back the path to their youth, to the "moment, one and infinite" in which they found each other once for all. "My perfect wife, my Leonor, Oh heart, my own, oh eyes, mine too, Whom else could I dare look backward for, With whom beside should I dare pursue The path grey heads abhor? * * * * * My own, confirm me! If I tread This path back, is it not in pride To think how little I dreamed it led To an age so blest that, by its side, Youth seems the waste instead?" And now read again: "Meet, _if thou require it_, Both demands, Laying flesh and spirit In thy hands." A lower note there, is it not? And shall he so require, and she so yield, that backward-treading path is not for them--never shall _they_ say to one another: "Come back with me to the first of all, Let us lean and love it over again, Let us now forget and now recall, Break the rosary in a pearly rain, And gather what we let fall!" Too many tears would fall on that wife's rosary--the wife who had begun so soon to know that Edens shall be lost by thinking Eves! But let me not enforce a moral. The mood is one that women know, and often wisely use. "Talking" _is_ to be hidden, "cheek on cheek," from the hawk on the bough: but talking, as this wife will quickly see, is not the sum of individuality's expression. She can teach him--learning from him all the while--_not_ to "require it": she, this same sweet, strong-souled woman, for to be able to speak as she speaks here is her sure indenture of freedom.