"I had wealth and ease,
Beauty, youth:
Since my lover gave me love,
I gave these.
That was all I meant
—To be just,
And the passion I had raised
To content.
Since he chose to change
Gold for dust,
If I gave him what he praised,
Was it strange?"
And after all it was not enough! "Justice" was not enough, the giving of herself was not enough. If she could try again, if she could find that "way undreamed" to pay her debt. . . .
I should like to omit two lines from the second of the stanzas quoted above:
"And the passion I had raised
To content."
From Browning, those words come oddly: moreover, elsewhere the girl cries:
"I, too, at love's brim
Touched the sweet:
I would die if death bequeathed
Sweet to him."
This is more than to "content" the "passion she had raised." Let us regard that phrase as unwritten: it is not authentic, it does not express either the girl or her poet.
The rest comes right and true—and more than all, perhaps, the second verse, where the mystery of passion in its coming no less than in its going is so subtly indicated.
"Strange! that very way
Love begun:
I as little understand
Love's decay."