though classed as dramatic-lyrical. The lover will see his love
in three days; and his complex sense of the delay, as meaning both _all_
this time, and _only_ this, is leavened by the joyful consciousness that
the reunion will be as absolute as the union has been. He knows that
life is full of chance and change. The possibilities of three days are a
great deal to encounter, very little to have escaped. Unsuspected
dangers may lurk in the coming year. But--he will see her in three days;
and in that thought he can laugh all misgiving and all fear to scorn.

"IN A GONDOLA" is a love scene, beginning with a serenade from a
gondola, and continued by the two lovers in it, after the Venetian
fashion of the olden time. They are escaping, as they think, the
vigilance of a certain "Three"--one of whom we may conjecture to be the
lady's husband or father--and have already regained her home, and fixed
the signal for to-morrow's meeting, when the lover is surprised and
stabbed. As they glide through the canals of the city, by its dark or
illuminated palaces, each concealing perhaps some drama of love or
crime--the sense of danger never absent from them,--the tense emotion
relieves itself in playful though impassioned fancies, in which the man
and the woman vie with each other. But when the blow has fallen, the
light tone gives way, on the lover's side, to one of solemn joy in the
happiness which has been realized.

"... The Three, I do not scorn
To death, because they never lived: but I
Have lived indeed, and so--(yet one more kiss)--can die!"
(vol. v. p. 77.)

"PORPHYRIA'S LOVER" is an episode which, with one of the poems of "Men
and Women," "Johannes Agricola in Meditation," first appeared under the
head of "Madhouse Cells."[70] Porphyria is deeply attached to her
"lover," but has not courage to break the ties of an artificial world,
and give herself to him; and when one night love prevails, and she
proves it by a voluntary act of devotion, he murders her in the act,
that her nobler and purer self may be preserved. Such a crime might be
committed in a momentary aberration, or even intense excitement, of
feeling. It is characterized here by a matter-of-fact simplicity, which
is its sign of madness. The distinction, however, is subtle; and we can
easily guess why this and its companion poem did not retain their
title. A madness which