ts of the poem elsewhere. It only
remains to say that nowhere is the lyric element in Browning's genius
more delightfully represented than in this little piece of mingled song
and action. There is no better love-lyric in his work than

You'll love me yet!--and I can tarry
Your love's protracted growing;

and the two snatches of song which Pippa sings when she is passing under
Ottima's window and the Monsignore's--"The year's at the spring" and
"Overhead the tree-tops meet"--possess, independent of the meaning of
the words and their poetic charm, a freshness, dewiness, morning
ravishment to which it is difficult to find an equal. They are filled
with youth and its delight, alike of the body and the soul. What
Browning's spirit felt and lived when he was young and his heart beating
with the life of the universe, is in them, and it is their greatest
charm.

* * * * *

CHAPTER IX

_POEMS OF THE PASSION OF LOVE_

When we leave _Paracelsus_, _Sordello_ and the _Dramas_ behind, and find
ourselves among the host of occasional poems contained in the _Dramatic
Lyrics_ and _Romances_, in _Men and Women_, in _Dramatis Personae_, and
in the later volumes, it is like leaving an unencumbered sea for one
studded with a thousand islands. Every island is worth a visit and
different from the rest. Their variety, their distinct scenery, their
diverse inhabitants, the strange surprises in them, are as continual an
enchantment for the poetic voyager as the summer isles of the Pacific.
But while each of them is different from the rest, yet, like the islands
in the Pacific, they fall into groups; and to isolate these groups is
perhaps the best way to treat so varied a collection of poems. To treat
them chronologically would be a task too long and wearisome for a book.
To treat them zoologically, if I may borrow that term, is possible, and
may be profitable. This chapter is dedicated to the poems which relate
to Love.

Commonly speaking, the term _Love Poems_ does not mean poems concerning
the absolute Love, or the love of Ideas, such as Truth or Beauty, or
Love of mankind or one's own country, or the loves that belong to home,
or the love of friends, or even married love unless it be specially
bound up, as it is in Browning's poem of _By the Fireside_, with
ante-nuptial love--but poems expressing the isolating passion of one sex
for the other; chiefly in youth, or in conditions which re