its glory has become more fugitive and more extrinsic,--a "grace not
theirs" brought by love "settling unawares" upon minds "level and low,
burnt and bare" in themselves. And he dwells now on desolate and desert
scenes with a new persistence, just as it was wild primitive nooks of
the French coast which now became his chosen summer resorts in place of
the semi-civic rusticity which had been his choice in Italy. "This is a
wild little place in Brittany," he wrote to Miss Blagden in August 1863;
"close to the sea, a hamlet of a dozen houses, perfectly lonely--one may
walk on the edge of the low rocks by the sea for miles.... If I could I
would stay just as I am for many a day. I feel out of the very earth
sometimes as I sit here at the window." The wild coast scenery falls in
with the desolate mood of James Lee's wife; the savage luxuriance of the
Isle with the primitive fancies of Caliban; the arid desert holds in
its embrace, like an oasis, the well-spring of Love which flows from the
lips of the dying Apostle. In the poetry of _Men and Women_ we see the
ripe corn and the flowers in bloom; in _Dramatis Personæ_, the processes
of Nature are less spontaneous and, as it were, less complete; the
desert and the abounding streams, the unreclaimed human nature and the
fertilising grace of love, emerge in a nearer approach to elemental
nakedness, and there are moods in which each appears to dominate.
Doubtless the mood which finally triumphed was that of the dying John
and of the Third Speaker; but it was a triumph no longer won by "the
happy prompt instinctive way of youth," and the way to it lay through
moods not unlike those of James Lee's wife, whose problem, like his own,
was how to live when the answering love was gone. His "fire," like hers,
was made "of shipwreck wood",[40] and her words "at the window" can only
be an echo of his--

"Ah, Love! but a day
And the world has changed!