This is the last of my "women unwon." In none of all these poems does courage fail; love is ever God's secret. It comes and goes: the heart has had its moment. It does not come at all: the heart has known the loved one's loveliness. It has but hoped to come: the heart hoped with it. It has set a price upon itself, a cruel crushing price: the heart will pay it, if it can be paid. It has waked too late--it calls from the grave: the heart will follow it there. No love is in vain: "For God above creates the love to reward the love." FOOTNOTES: [277:1] He excepts, of course, all through this passage, _Any Wife to any Husband_--a poem which has not fallen into my scheme. [285:1] No line which Browning has written is more characteristic than this--nor more famous. [289:1] In _By the Fireside_. [290:1] Arthur Symons, _Introduction to the Study of Browning_, p. 198. [291:1] Browning himself, asked by Dr. Furnivall, on behalf of the Browning Society, to explain this allusion, answered in the fashion which he often loved to use towards such inquirers: "The 'seven spirits' are in the Apocalypse, also in Coleridge and Byron, a common image." . . . "I certainly never intended" (he also said) "to personify wisdom, or philosophy, or any other abstraction." And he summed up the, after all, sufficiently obvious meaning by saying that _Numpholeptos_ is "an allegory of an impossible ideal object of love, accepted conventionally as such by a man who all the while" (as I have once or twice had occasion to say of himself!) "cannot quite blind himself to the fact that" (to put it more concisely than he) knowledge and purity are best obtained by achievement. Still more concisely: "Innocence--sin--virtue"--in the Hegelian chord of experience. [301:1] Here is a clear echo of Heine, in one of his most renowned lyrics:-- "The dead stand up, 'tis the midnight bell, In crazy dances they're leaping: We two in the grave lie well, lie well, And I in thine arms am sleeping. The dead stand up, 'tis the Judgment Day, To Heaven or Hell they're hieing: We two care nothing, we two will stay Together quietly lying." II THE WOMAN WON Love is not static. We may not sit down and say, "It cannot be more than now; it will not be less. Henceforth I take it for granted." Though she be won, there still is more to do. I say "she" (and Browning says it), because the taking-for-granted ideal is essentially man's--woman has never been persuaded to hold it. Possibly it is _because_ men feel so keenly the elusiveness of women that they grow weary in the quest of the real Herself. But, says Browning, they must not grow weary in it. Elusive though she be, her lover must not leave her uncaptured. For if love is the greatest adventure, it is also the longest. We cannot come to an end of it--and, if we were wise, should not desire so to do.