lood that burns!
Earth's returns
For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin.
Shut them in
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!
Love is best!"

But though love be best, it is not all. It is here to transfigure all;
we must accept with it the merer things it glorifies. For life calls us,
even from our love. The day is long and we must work in it; but we can
meet when the day is done. In the light of this low half-moon can put
off in our boat, and row across and push the prow into the slushy sand
at the other side of the bay:

"Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!"

Yes--we can meet at night. . . . But we must part at morning.

"Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,
And the sun looked over the mountain's rim;
And straight was a path of gold for him,
And the need of a world of men for me."[205:1]

These are plainly not wedded lovers, though some commentators so
describe them; and indeed Browning sings but seldom of wedded love. When
he does so sing, he reaches heights of beauty beyond any in the other
lyrics, but the poems of marriage are not in our survey. In nearly all
his other love-poetry, it is the "trouble of love," in one form or
another, which occupies him--the lovers who meet to part; those who love
"in vain" (as the phrase goes, but never _his_ phrase); those who choose
separation rather than defiance of the "world, and what it fears"; those
who do defy that world, and reckon up their gains.

"Dear, had the world in its caprice
Deigned to proclaim 'I know you both,
Have recognised your plighted troth,
Am sponsor for you: live in peace!'--
How many precious months and years
Of youth had passed, that speed so fast,
Before we found it out at last,
The world, and what it fears?

How much of priceless life were spent
With men that every virtue decks,
And women models of their sex,
Society's true ornament--
Ere we dared wander, nights like this,
Thro' wind and rain, and watch the Seine,
And feel the Boulevard break again
To warmth and light and bliss?"

That old quarrel between t