[262:1] These lines were published by Browning, separately, in 1836, when he was twenty-six. _James Lee's Wife_ was published in 1864. [263:1] Nettleship well says: "The difference between the first and second parts of this section is that, while the plaint of the wind was enough to make Browning write in 1836, he must have the plaint of a soul in 1863. . . . And yet, something is lost." PART V [Illustration: THE TROUBLE OF LOVE] TROUBLE OF LOVE: THE MAN'S I THE WOMAN UNWON In the section entitled "Lovers Meeting" we saw the exultant mood of love in man, and I there pointed out how seldom even Browning has assigned that mood to woman. But he does not show her as alone in suffering love's pain. The lyrics we are now to consider give us woman as the maker of love's pain for man; we learn her in this character through the utterances of men--and these are noble utterances, every one. Mr. J. T. Nettleship, in his _Essays and Thoughts_, well remarks that man's passion shows, in Browning's work, "a greater width of view and intellectual power" than woman's does; that in the feminine utterances "little beyond the actual love of this life is imagined";[277:1] and that in such utterances "we notice . . . an absolute want of originality and of power to look at the passion of love in an abstract sense outside the woman herself and her lover." I too have, by implication, found this fault with Browning; but Mr. Nettleship differs from me in that he apparently delights to dwell on the idea of woman's accepted inferiority--her "tender, unaspiring love . . . type of that perfection which looks to one superior." It will be seen from this how little he is involved by feminism. That woman should be the glad inferior quarrels not at all with his vision of things as they should be. Man, indeed, he grants, "must firmly establish his purity and constancy before he dares to assert supremacy over Nature": woman, we may suppose, being--as if she were not quite certainly _a person_--included in Nature. That a devotee of Browning should retain this attitude may well surprise us, since nothing in his "teaching" is clearer than that woman is the great inspiring influence for man. But the curious fact which has struck both Mr. Nettleship and myself--that, in Browning's work, woman does so frequently, _when expressing herself_, fail in breadth and imagination--may very well account for the obsolete gesture in this interpreter. . . . Can it be, then, that Browning was (as has frequently been said of him) very much less dramatic a writer than he wished to believe himself? Or, more aptly for our purpose to frame the question, was he dramatic only for men? Did he merely guess at, and not grasp, the deepest emotions and thoughts of women? This, if it be affirmed, will rob him of some glory--yet I think that affirmed it must be. It leaves him all nobility of mind and heart with regard to us; the glory of which he is robbed is after all but that