Browning in general isolates a single moment or mood of passion, and studies it, with its shifting lights and shadows, as a living microcosm; often it is a moment of crisis, a moment of culmination.

For once in _James Lee's Wife_ (named in the first edition by a stroke of perversity _James Lee_), he represents in a sequence of lyrics a sequence of moods, and with singular success.

The season of the year is autumn, and autumn as felt not among golden wheatfields, but on a barren and rocky sea-coast; the processes of the declining year, from the first touch of change to bareness everywhere, accompany and accord with those of the decline of hope in the wife's heart for any return of her love.

Her offence is that she has loved too well; that she has laid upon her husband too great a load of devotion; hostility might be met and vanquished; but how can she deal with a heart which love itself only petrifies?
It should be a warning to critics who translate dramatic poems into imaginary biography to find that Browning, who had known so perfect a success in the one love of his life, should constantly present in work of imagination the ill fortunes of love and lovers.

Looking a little below the surface we see that he could not write directly, he could not speak effusively, of the joy that he had known.