_James Lee's Wife_ is a type of the other idyls of love which form so
large a part of the _Dramatis Personæ_. The note of dissonance, of loss,
which they sound had been struck by Browning before, but never with the
same persistence and iteration. The _Dramatic Lyrics_ and _Men and
Women_ are not quite silent of the tragic failure of love; but it is
touched lightly in "swallow flights of song," like the _Lost Mistress_,
that "dip their wings in tears and skim away." And the lovers are
spiritual athletes, who can live on the memory of a look, and seem to be
only irradiated, not scorched, by the tragic flame. But these lovers of
the 'Sixties are of less ætherial temper; they are more obviously,
familiarly human; the loss of what they love comes home to them, and
there is agony in the purifying fire. Such are the wronged husband in
_The Worst of It_, and the finally frustrated lover in _Too Late_. In
the group of "Might-have-been" lyrics the sense of loss is less poignant
and tragic but equally uncompensated. "You fool!" cries the homely
little heroine of _Dis Aliter Visum_ to the elderly scholar who ten
years before had failed to propose to her,--

"You fool for all your lore!...
The devil laughed at you in his sleeve!
You knew not? That I well believe;
Or you had saved two souls;--nay, four."

Nor is there much of the glory of failure in Kate Brown's bitter smile,
as she sums up the story of Youth and Art:--

"Each life unfulfilled, you see;
It hangs still, patchy and scrappy,
We have not sighed deep, laughed free,