e imaginative mind, truth is not simply actuality. As for
'Two in the Campagna': it is too universally true to be merely personal.
There is a gulf which not the profoundest search can fathom, which not
the strongest-winged love can overreach: the gulf of individuality. It
is those who have loved most deeply who recognise most acutely this
always pathetic and often terrifying isolation of the soul. None save
the weak can believe in the absolute union of two spirits. If this were
demonstratable, immortality would be a palpable fiction. The moment
individuality can lapse to fusion, that moment the tide has ebbed, the
wind has fallen, the dream has been dreamed. So long as the soul
remains inviolate amid all shock of time and change, so long is it
immortal. No man, no poet assuredly, could love as Browning loved, and
fail to be aware, often with vague anger and bitterness, no doubt, of
this insuperable isolation even when spirit seemed to leap to spirit, in
the touch of a kiss, in the evanishing sigh of some one or other
exquisite moment. The poem tells us how the lovers, straying hand in
hand one May day across the Campagna, sat down among the seeding
grasses, content at first in the idle watching of a spider spinning her
gossamer threads from yellowing fennel to other vagrant weeds. All
around them

"The champaign with its endless fleece
Of feathery grasses everywhere!
Silence and passion, joy and peace,
An everlasting wash of air-- ...

"Such life here, through such length of hours,
Such miracles performed in play,
Such primal naked forms of flowers,
Such letting nature have her way." ...

Let us too be unashamed of soul, the poet-lover says, even as earth lies
bare to heaven. Nothing is to be overlooked. But all in vain: in vain "I
drink my fill at your soul's springs."

"Just when I seemed about to learn!
Where is the thread now? off again!
The old trick! Only I discern--
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn."

It was during this visit to Rome that both were gratified by the
proposal in the leading English literary weekly, that the
Poet-Laureateship, vacant by the death of Wordsworth, should be
conferred upon Mrs. Browning: though both rejoiced when they learned
that the honour had devolved upon one whom each so ardently admired as
Alfred Tennyson. In 1851 a visit was paid to England, not one very much