I.--She Speaks At The Window

He is coming back to their seaside home at Sainte-Marie, near Pornic--the Breton "wild little place" which Browning knew and loved so well. "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. I feel out of the earth sometimes as I sit here at the window."[254:1]

And at the window she sits, watching for James Lee's return. Yesterday it was summer, but the strange sudden "stop" has come, eerily, as it always seems to come.

"Ah, Love, but a day And the world has changed! The sun's away, And the bird estranged; The wind has dropped, And the sky's deranged: Summer has stopped."

We can picture him as he arrives and listens to her: is there already a faint annoyance? Need she so drearily depict the passing of summer? It is bad enough that it should pass--we need not talk about it! Such annoyance we all have felt with the relentless chroniclers of change. Enough, enough; since summer is gone and we cannot bring it back, let us think of something else. . . . But she goes on, and now we shall not\ doubt that he is enervated, for this is what she says:

"Look in my eyes! Wilt thou change too? Should I fear surprise? Shall I find aught new In the old and dear, In the good and true, With the changing year?"

The questions have come to her--come on what cold blast from heaven, or him? But in pity for herself, let her not ask them! We seem to see the man turn from her, not "looking in her eyes," and seem to catch the thought, so puerile yet so instinctive, that flashes through his mind. "I never meant to 'change'; why does she put it into my head." . . . And then, doomed blunderer, she goes on:

"Thou art a man, But I am thy love. For the lake, its swan; For the dell, its dove; And for thee (oh, haste!) Me, to bend above, Me, to hold embraced."

She does not say, "oh, haste!"--that is the silent comment (we must think) on her not instantly answered plea for his embrace. . . . And when the embrace does come--the claimed embrace--we can figure to ourselves the all it lacks.