19.

Not from the fault of the builder, though,

For a pent-house properly projects
Where three carved beams make a certain show,
Dating good thought of our architect's-
'Five, six, nine, he lets you know.

20.

And all day long a bird sings there,

And a stray sheep drinks at the pond at times;

The place is silent and aware;

It has had its scenes, its joys and crimes,
But that is its own affair.

21.

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 gray heads abhor?

22.

For it leads to a crag's sheer edge with them;
Youth, flowery all the way, there stops-

St. 20. aware: self-conscious.

St. 21. He digresses here, and does not return to the subject till the 31st stanza, "What did I say?—that a small bird sings." The path gray heads abhor: this verse and the following stanza are, with most readers, the crux of the poem; "gray heads" must be understood with some restriction: many gray heads, not all, abhor-gray heads who went along through their flowery youth as if it had no limit, and without insuring, in Love's true season, the happiness of their lives beyond youth's limit, “fife's safe hem,” which to cross without such insurance, is often fatal. And these, when they reach old age, shun retracing the path which led to the gulf wherein their youth dropped.

Not they; age threatens and they contemn,

Till they reach the gulf wherein youth drops,
One inch from our life's safe hem!

When, if I think but deep enough,

You are wont to answer, prompt as rhyme;
And you, too, find without rebuff

Response your soul seeks many a time,
Piercing its fine flesh-stuff.

At first, 'twas something our two souls
Should mix as mists do; each is sucked

In each now on, the new stream rolls,
Whatever rocks obstruct.

St. 23. With me, the speaker continues, youth led — we are told whither, in St. 25, v. 4, "to an age so blest that, by its side, youth seems the waste instead." I will speak now: up to this point his reflections have been silent, his wife, the while, reading, mutely, by fire-light, his heart knows how, that is, with her heart Secretly responsive to his own. The mutual responsiveness of their hearts is expressed in St. 24.

27.

Think, when our one soul understands
The great Word which makes all things new,
When earth breaks up and heaven expands,
How will the change strike me and you
In the house not made with hands?

28.

Oh I must feel your brain prompt mine,
Your heart anticipate my heart,

You must be just before, in fine,

See and make me see, for your part,
New depths of the divine!

29.

But who could have expected this
When we two drew together first
Just for the obvious human bliss,
To satisfy life's daily thirst
With a thing men seldom miss?

30.

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!

31.

What did I say?- that a small bird sings

All day long, save when a brown pair

Of hawks from the wood float with wide wings

St. 28. "The conviction of the eternity of marriage meets us again and again in Browning's poems; e.g., Prospice, Any Wife to any Husband, The Epilogue to Fifine." The union between two complementary souls cannot be dissolved. 'Love is all,

and Death is nought!"

St. 31. Here he returns to the subject broken off at St. 21.

Strained to a bell: 'gainst noonday glare You count the streaks and rings.

32.

But at afternoon or almost eve

'Tis better; then the silence grows To that degree, you half believe

It must get rid of what it knows, Its bosom does so heave.

33.

Hither we walked then, side by side,
Arm in arm and cheek to cheek,

And still I questioned or replied,

While my heart, convulsed to really speak,

Lay choking in its pride.

34.

Silent the crumbling bridge we cross,
And pity and praise the chapel sweet,

And care about the fresco's loss,

And wish for our souls a like retreat, And wonder at the moss.

35.

Stoop and kneel on the settle under,

Look through the window's grated square: Nothing to see! For fear of plunder,

The cross is down and the altar bare, As if thieves don't fear thunder.

36.

We stoop and look in through the grate,

See the little porch and rustic door,

Read duly the dead builder's date;

Then cross the bridge that we crossed before,

Take the path again - but wait!

37.

Oh moment one and infinite!

The water slips o'er stock and stone;
The West is tender, hardly bright:

How gray at once is the evening grown
One star, its chrysolite !

38.

We two stood there with never a third,
But each by each, as each knew well:
The sights we saw and the sounds we heard,
The lights and the shades made up a spell
Till the trouble grew and stirred.

39.

Oh, the little more, and how much it is!
And the little less, and what worlds away!
How a sound shall quicken content to bliss,

Or a breath suspend the blood's best play,
And life be a proof of this!

St. 37, 38. "Mr. Browning's most characteristic feeling for nature appears in his rendering of those aspects of sky, or earth, or sea, of sunset, or noonday, or dawn, which seem to acquire some sudden and passionate significance; which seem to be charged with some spiritual secret eager for disclosure; in his rendering of those moments which betray the passion at the heart of things, which thrill and tingle with prophetic fire. When lightning searches for the guilty lovers, Ottima and Sebald [in Pippa Passes], like an angelic sword plunged into the gloom, when the tender twilight with its one chrysolite star, grows aware, and the light and shade make up a spell, and the forests by their mystery, and sound, and silence, mingle together two human lives forever [By the Fireside], when the apparition of the moon-rainbow appears gloriously after storm, and Christ is in his heaven [Christmas Eve], when to David the stars shoot out the pain of pent knowledge and in the grey of the hills at morning there dwells a gathered intensity [Saul], then nature rises from her sweet ways of use and wont, and shows herself the Priestess, the Pythoness, the Divinity which she is. Or rather, through nature, the Spirit of God addresses itself to the spirit of man."— Edward Dowden.