ese studies are numerous, and I group a few of them
together according to their motives, leaving out some which I shall
hereafter treat of when I come to discuss the women in Browning. _Evelyn
Hope_ has nothing to do with the passion of love. The physical element
of love is entirely excluded by the subject. It is a beautiful
expression of a love purely spiritual, to be realised in its fulness
only after death, spirit with spirit, but yet to be kept as the master
of daily life, to whose law all thought and action are referred. The
thought is noble, the expression of it simple, fine, and clear. It is,
moreover, close to truth--there are hundreds of men who live quietly in
love of that kind, and die in its embrace.

In _Cristina_ the love is just as spiritual, but the motive of the poem
is not one, as in _Evelyn Hope_, but two. The woman is not dead, and she
has missed her chance. But the lover has not. He has seen her and in a
moment loved her. She also looked on him and felt her soul matched by
his as they "rushed together." But the world carried her away and she
lost the fulness of life. He, on the contrary, kept the moment for ever,
and with it, her and all she might have been with him.

Her soul's mine: and thus grown perfect,
I shall pass my life's remainder.

This is not the usual Love-poem. It is a love as spiritual, as mystic,
even more mystic, since the woman lives, than the lover felt for Evelyn
Hope.

The second motive in _Cristina_ of the lover who meets the true partner
of his soul or hers, and either seizes the happy hour and possesses joy
for ever, or misses it and loses all, is a favourite with Browning. He
repeats it frequently under diverse circumstances, for it opened out so
many various endings, and afforded so much opportunity for his beloved
analysis. Moreover, optimist as he was in his final thought of man, he
was deeply conscious of the ironies of life, of the ease with which
things go wrong, of the impossibility of setting them right from
without. And in the matter of love he marks in at least four poems how
the moment was held and life was therefore conquest. Then in _Youth and
Art_, in _Dis Aliter Visum_, in _Bifurcation_, in _The Lost Mistress_,
and in _Too Late_, he records the opposite fate, and in characters so
distinct that the repetition of the motive is not monotonous. These are
studies of the Might-have-beens of love.

Another motive, used with varied circumstance in three o