She walks "along the Beach," or "on the Cliff," or "among the rocks," and the voices of sea and wind ("Such a soft sea and such a mournful wind!" he wrote to Miss Blagden) become speaking symbols in her preoccupied mind.

Not at all, however, in the fashion of the "pathetic fallacy." She is too deeply disenchanted to imagine pity; and Browning puts into her mouth (part vi.) a significant criticism of some early stanzas of his own, in which he had in a buoyant optimistic fashion interpreted the wailing of the wind.[41] If Nature has aught to teach, it is the sterner doctrine, that nothing endures; that Love, like the genial sunlight, has to glorify base things, to raise the low nature by its throes, sometimes divining the hidden spark of God in what seemed mere earth, sometimes only lending its transient splendour to a dead and barren spirit,--the fiery grace of a butterfly momentarily obliterating the dull turf or rock it lights on, but leaving them precisely what they were.
[Footnote 41: Cf.

_supra_, p.

16.] _James Lee's Wife_ is a type of the other idyls of love which form so large a part of the _Dramatis Personae_.

The note of dissonance, of loss, which they sound had been struck by Browning before, but never with the same persistence and iteration.