ne careless rapture!"

The whole poem is beautiful, but _Home-Thoughts from the Sea_ is of that
order of song that moves the heart "more than with a trumpet."

"Nobly, nobly, Cape Saint Vincent to the North-West died away;
Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay;
Bluish 'mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay;
In the dimmest North-East distance dawned Gibraltar grand and gray;
'Here and here did England help me: how can I help England?'--say,
Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise and pray,
While Jove's planet rises yonder, silent over Africa."

Next to _The Lost Leader_ comes, in the original edition, a sort of
companion poem, in

"THE LOST MISTRESS.

I.

All's over, then: does truth sound bitter
As one at first believes?
Hark! 'tis the sparrows' good-night twitter
About your cottage eaves!

II.

And the leaf-buds on the vine are woolly,
I noticed that, to-day;
One day more bursts them open fully
--You know the red turns gray.

III.

To-morrow we meet the same, then, dearest?
May I take your hand in mine?
Mere friends are we,--well, friends the merest
Keep much that I resign:

IV.

For each glance of the eye so bright and black
Though I keep with heart's endeavour,--
Your voice, when you wish the snowdrops back,
Though it stay in my heart for ever!--

V.

Yet I will but say what mere friends say,
Or only a thought stronger;
I will hold your hand but as long as all may.
Or so very little longer!"

This is one of those love-songs which we cannot but consider among the
noblest of such songs in all Love's language. The subject of "unrequited
love" has probably produced more effusions of sickly sentiment than any
other single subject. But Browning, who has employed the motive so
often (here, for instance, and yet more notably in _The Last Ride
Together_) deals with it in a way that is at once novel and fundamental.
There is no talk, among his lovers, of "blighted hearts," no whining and
puling, no contemptible professions of contempt for the woman who has
had the ill-taste to refuse some wondrous-conceited lover, but a noble
manly resignation, a profound and still grateful sorrow which has no
touch in it of reproach, no tone of disloyalty, a