be so easy to her to be faithful to the end!” Her grief is unselfish.  The wrong she apprehends will be done to his spiritual dignity far more than to his love for her, though with a touch of feminine inconsistency she identifies the two; and she cannot resign herself to the idea that he whose earthly trial is “three parts” overcome will break down under this final test.  She accepts it, however, as the inevitable.

“TWO IN THE CAMPAGNA.”  The sentiment of this poem can only be rendered in its concluding words: 

       “Infinite passion, and the pain
       Of finite hearts that yearn.” (vol. vi. p. 153.)

For its pain is that of a heart both restless and weary:  ever seeking to grasp the Infinite in the finite, and ever eluded by it.  The sufferer is a man.  He longs to rest in the affection of a woman who loves him, and whom he also loves; but whenever their union seems complete, his soul is spirited away, and he is adrift again.  He asks the meaning of it all—­where the fault lies, if fault there be; he begs her to help him to discover it.  The Campagna is around them, with its “endless fleece of feathery grasses,” its “everlasting wash of air;” its wide suggestions of passion and of peace.  The clue to the enigma seems to glance across him, in the form of a gossamer thread.  He traces it from point to point, by the objects on which it rests.  But just as he calls his love to help him to hold it fast, it breaks off, and floats into the invisible.  His doom is endless change.  The tired, tantalized spirit must accept it.

“LOVE IN A LIFE” represents the lover as inhabiting the same house with his unseen love; and pursuing her in it ceaselessly from room to room, always catching the flutter of her retreating presence, always sure that the next moment he will overtake her.

“LIFE IN A LOVE” might be the utterance of the same person, when he has grasped the fact that the loved one is determined to elude him.  She may baffle his pursuit, but he will never desist from it, though it absorb his whole life.

“THE LOST MISTRESS” is the farewell expression of a discarded love which has accepted the conditions of friendship.  Its tone is full of manly self-restraint and of patient sadness.

“A WOMAN’S LAST WORD” is one of moral and intellectual self-surrender.  She has been contending with her husband, and been silenced by the feeling, not that the truth is on his side, but that it was not worth the pain of such a contention.  What, she seems to ask herself, is the value of truth, when it is false to her Divinity; or knowledge, when it costs her her Eden?  She begs him whom she worships as well as loves, to mould her to himself; but she begs also the privilege of a few tears—­a last tribute, perhaps, to her sacrificed conscience, and her lost liberty.