es love, so fixed that it bars its possibility. He rebels at
last, but the rebellion is momentary. He renews his hopeless quest.

"PROLOGUE" is a fanciful expression of the ideas of impediment visible
and invisible, which may be raised by the aspect of a brick wall; such a
one, perhaps, as projects at a right angle to the window of Mr.
Browning's study, and was before him when he wrote.

"NATURAL MAGIC" attests the power of love to bring, as by enchantment,
summer with its warmth and blossoms, into a barren life.

"MAGICAL NATURE" is a tribute to the beauty of countenance which
proceeds from the soul, and has therefore a charmed existence defying
the hand of time.

The INTRODUCTION to the "TWO POETS OF CROISIC," (reprinted under the
title of "Apparitions,") recalls the sentiment of "Natural Magic." The
"TALE" with which it concludes is inspired by the same feeling. Its
circumstance is ancient, and the reader is allowed to imagine that it
exists in Latin or Greek; but it is simply a poetic and profound
illustration of what love can do always and everywhere. A famous poet
was singing to his lyre. One of its strings snapped. The melody would
have been lost, had not a cricket (properly, cicada) flown on to the
lyre and chirped the missing note. The note, thus sounded, was more
beautiful than as produced by the instrument itself, and, to the song's
end, the cricket remained to do the work of the broken string. The poet,
in his gratitude, had a statue of himself made with the lyre in his
hand, and the cricket perched on the point of it. They were thus
immortalized together: she, whom he had enthroned, he, whom she had
crowned.

Love is the cricket which repairs the broken harmonies of life.

The dramatic setting of the majority of the Love poems serves, as I have
said, to bring out the vitality of Mr. Browning's conception of love;
and though anything like labelling a poet's work brings with it a sense
of anomaly, we shall only carry out the spirit of this particular group
by connecting each member of it with the condition of thought or feeling
it is made to illustrate.

It will be seen that the dramatic Lyrics and Dramatic Romances, which
supply so many of the poems of the following and other groups, had been
largely recruited from the first collection of "Men and Women;" having
first, in several instances, contributed to that work.

DRAMATIC LOVE POEMS.

"Cristina." (Love as the special gain of life