"And yet--she has not spoke so long!" She is as silent as he. They might both be in a trance. He knows what his trance is--can it be that hers is the same? Then what would it mean? . . . And the hope so manfully resigned floods back on him. What if this _be_ heaven--what if she has found, caught up like him, that she does love? Can it mean that, gazing both, now in this glorious moment, at life's flower of love, they both are fixed so, ever shall so abide--she with him, as he with her? Can it mean that the instant is made eternity-- "And heaven just prove that I and she Ride, ride together, for ever ride?" * * * * * Despite the transcendental interpretations of this glorious love-song--surpassed, I think and many others think, by none in the world--I believe that the concluding stanza means just that. Hope has rushed on him again from her twin-silence--can she be at one with him in all, as she is in this? Will the proud dark eyes have forgotten the pity--and the pride? . . . The wrong that has been done to Browning by his too-subtle "interpreters" is, in my view, incalculable. Always he must be, for them, the teacher. But he is the _poet_! He "sings, riding's a joy"--and such joy brings hope along with it, hope for the "obvious human bliss." People seem to forget that it was Browning who made that phrase[289:1]--which might almost be his protest against the transcendentalists. Much of his finest work has been thus falsified, thus strained to meanings so "profound" as to be none at all. Mr. Nettleship's gloss upon this stanza of _The Last Ride_ is a case in point. "[The lover] buoys himself with the hope that the highest bliss _may_ be the change from the minute's joy to an eternal fulfilment of joy." Does this mean anything? And if it did, does that stanza mean _it_? I declare that it means nothing, and that the stanza means what instinctively (I feel and know) each reader, reading it--not "studying" it--accepts as its best meaning: the human one, the true following of the so subtly-induced mood. And that is, simply, the invigoration, the joy, of riding; and the hope which comes along with that invigoration and that joy. + + + + + In the strange _Numpholeptos_ we find, by implication, the heart of Browning's "message" for women. "The nympholepts of old," explains Mr. Augustine Birrell in one of the volumes of _Obiter Dicta_, "were those unfortunates who, whilst carelessly strolling among sylvan shades, caught a hasty glimpse of some spiritual inmate of the woods, in whose pursuit their whole lives were ever afterwards fruitlessly spent." The man here has fallen in love with "an angelically pure and inhumanly cold woman, who requires in him an unattainable union of immaculate purity and complete experience of life."[290:1]