s me at last
You around me for once, you beneath me, above me--
Me--sure that despite of time future, time past,--
This tick of our life-time's one moment you love me!
How long such suspension may linger? Ah, Sweet--
The moment eternal--just that and no more--
When ecstasy's utmost we clutch at the core,
While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut and lips meet!"

Here the whole situation is merged in the single cry, the joy,
"unbodied" and "embodied," of any, of every lover; in several of the
poems a more developed story is told or indicated. One of the finest
pieces in the volume is the brief dramatic monologue called
_Inapprehensiveness_, which condenses a whole tragedy into its
thirty-two lines, in the succinct, suggestive manner of such poems as
_My Last Duchess_. Only Heine, Browning, and George Meredith in _Modern
Love_, each in his entirely individual way, have succeeded in dealing,
in a tone of what I may call sympathetic irony, with the unheroic
complications of modern life; so full of poetic matter really, but of
matter so difficult to handle. The poem is a mere incident, such as
happens every day: we are permitted to overhear a scrap of trivial
conversation; but this very triviality does but deepen the effect of
what we surmise, a dark obstruction, underneath the "babbling runnel" of
light talk. A study not entirely dissimilar, though, as its name warns
us, more difficult to grasp, is the fourth of the _Bad Dreams_: how
fine, how impressive, in its dream-distorted picture of a man's remorse
for the love he has despised or neglected till death, coming in, makes
love and repentance alike too late! With these may be named that other
electric little poem, _Which?_ a study in love's casuistries, reminding
one slightly of the finest of all Browning's studies in that kind,
_Adam, Lilith, and Eve_.

It is in these small poems, dealing varyingly with various phases of
love, that the finest, the rarest, work in the volume is to be found.
Such a poem as _Imperante Augusto natus est_ (strong, impressive,
effective as it is) cannot but challenge comparison with what is
incomparable, the dramatic monologues of _Men and Women_, and in
particular with the _Epistle of Karshish_. In _Beatrice Signorini_ we
have one of the old studies in lovers' casuistries; and it is told with
gusto, but is after all scarcely more than its last line claims for it:
"The pretty incident I put in rhyme."