It is the trouble of love. He may never reach her. . . . They look at one another, and he takes heart again. "But what if I fail of my purpose here? It is but to keep the nerves at strain, To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall, And, baffled, get up and begin again-- So the chase takes up one's life, that's all." But she is now almost repelled. She is not this enigma: she _wants_ him to grasp her. Well, then, she can help him, he says: "Look but once from your farthest bound At me so deep in the dust and dark, No sooner the old hope goes to ground Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark, I shape me-- Ever Removed!" Is not this the meaning? The two poems seem to me supplementary of each other. First, the sense of her elusiveness; then the dim resentment and fear which this knowledge of mystery awakes in her. She does not (as I have seemed to make her) _speak_ in either of these poems; but the thoughts are those which she must have, and so far, surely, her lover can divine her? The explanation given both by Mrs. Orr and Berdoe of _Love in a Life_ (the first lyric), that the lover is "inhabiting the same house with his love," seems to me simply inept. Is it not clear that no material house[308:1] is meant? They are both inhabiting the _body_; and she, passing through this sphere, touching it at various points, leaves the spell of her mere being everywhere--on the curtain, the couch, the cornice-wreath, the mirror. But through _her_ house he cannot range, as she through actualities. And though ever she eludes him, this is not what she sets out to do; she needs his comprehension; she does not desire to "escape" him. The old enigma that is no enigma--the sphinx with the answer to the riddle ever trembling on her lips! But if she were understood, she might be taken for granted. . . . So the lips may tremble, but the answer is kept back: "While the one eludes must the other pursue." "The desire of the man is for the woman; the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man." In those two poems the lovers are almost gay; they can turn and smile at one another 'mid the perplexity. The man is eager, resolute, humorous; the woman, if not acquiescent, is at least apprehending. The heart shall find her some day: "next time herself, not the trouble behind her!" She feels that she can aid him to that finding; it depends, in the last resort, on _her_. But in _Two in the Campagna_ a different lover is to deal with. What he wants is more than this. He wants to pass the limits of personality, to forget the search in the oneness. There is more than "finding" to be done: finding is not the secret. He tries to tell her--and he cannot tell her, for he does not himself fully know.