t passion, and in the last verse, and, still
more, in the single line--

"Who knows but the world may end to-night?"

the dramatic intensity strikes as with an electric shock.

_By the Fireside_ though in all its circumstances purely dramatic and
imaginary, rises again and again to the fervour of personal feeling, and
we can hardly be wrong in classing it, in soul though not in
circumstance, with _One Word More_ and the other sacred poems which
enshrine the memory of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But, apart from this
suggestion, the poem is a masterpiece of subtle simplicity and
picturesqueness. Nothing could be more admirable in themselves than the
natural descriptions throughout; but these are never mere isolated
descriptions, nor even a mere stationary background: they are fused with
the emotion which they both help to form and assist in revealing.

_One Word More_ (_To E. B. B._) is one of those sacred poems in which,
once and again, a great poet has embalmed in immortal words the holiest
and deepest emotion of his existence. Here, and here only in the songs
consecrated by the husband to the wife, the living love that too soon
became a memory is still "a hope, to sing by gladly." _One Word More_ is
Browning's answer to the _Sonnets from the Portuguese_. And, just as
Mrs. Browning never wrote anything more perfect than the _Sonnets_, so
Browning has never written anything more perfect than the answering
lyric.

Yet another section of this most richly varied volume consists of poems,
narrative and lyrical, dealing in a brief and pregnant way with some
special episode or emotion: love, in some instances, but in a less
exclusive way than in the love-poems proper. _The Statue and the Bust_
(one of Browning's best narratives) is a romantic and mainly true tale,
written in _terza rima_, but in short lines. The story on which it is
founded is a Florentine tradition.

"In the piazza of the SS. Annunziata at Florence is an
equestrian statue of the Grand Duke Ferdinand the First,
representing him as riding away from the church, with his
head turned in the direction of the Riccardi [now Antinori]
Palace, which occupies one corner of the square. Tradition
asserts that he loved a lady whom her husband's jealousy kept
a prisoner there; and that he avenged his love by placing
himself in effigy where his glance could always dwell upon
her."[33]

In the poem the lovers agree to fly tog