Once more we can trace there his development from Pauline. She, looking up "as I might kill her and be loved the more," had, to the lover's thinking, laid her flesh and spirit in his hands, precisely as the wife in the Last Word resolves to do. . . . As the poet grew, so grew the man in Browning: we reach By the Fireside from these. For the woman in the Last Word, strong to lay aside herself, to "think his thought," could with that strength, used otherwise, bring that husband to the place where stands the man in By the Fireside, when the "long dark autumn evenings" are come, and together with his wife he treads back the path to their youth, to the "moment, one and infinite" in which they found each other once for all.
"My perfect wife, my Leonor,
Oh heart, my own, oh eyes, mine too,
Whom else could I dare look backward for,
With whom beside should I dare pursue
The path grey heads abhor?
* * * * *
My own, confirm me! If I tread
This path back, is it not in pride
To think how little I dreamed it led
To an age so blest that, by its side,
Youth seems the waste instead?"
And now read again:
"Meet, if thou require it,
Both demands,
Laying flesh and spirit
In thy hands."
A lower note there, is it not? And shall he so require, and she so yield, that backward-treading path is not for them—never shall they say to one another:
"Come back with me to the first of all,
Let us lean and love it over again,
Let us now forget and now recall,
Break the rosary in a pearly rain,
And gather what we let fall!"
Too many tears would fall on that wife's rosary—the wife who had begun so soon to know that Edens shall be lost by thinking Eves!
But let me not enforce a moral. The mood is one that women know, and often wisely use. "Talking" is to be hidden, "cheek on cheek," from the hawk on the bough: but talking, as this wife will quickly see, is not the sum of individuality's expression. She can teach him—learning from him all the while—not to "require it": she, this same sweet, strong-souled woman, for to be able to speak as she speaks here is her sure indenture of freedom.