he text for the whole volume of Browning's love-poetry; but the text is
wrought out with an amazingly acute vision for all the things which are
not love. "Love triumphing over the world" might have been the motto for
most of the love-poems in _Men and Women_; but some would have had to be
assigned to the opposite rubric, "The world triumphing over love."
Sometimes Love's triumph is, for Browning, the rapture of complete
union, for which all outer things exist only by subduing themselves to
its mood and taking its hue; sometimes it is the more ascetic and
spiritual triumph of an unrequited lover in the lonely glory of his
love.

The triumph of Browning's united lovers has often a superb Elizabethan
note of defiance. Passion obliterates for them the past and throws a
mystically hued veil over Nature. The gentle Romantic sentiments hardly
touch the fresh springs of their emotion. They may meet and woo "among
the ruins," as Coleridge met and wooed his Genevieve "beside the ruined
tower"; but their song does not, like his, "suit well that ruin old and
hoary," but, on the contrary, tramples with gay scorn upon the lingering
memories of the ruined city,--a faded pageant yoked to its triumphal
car.

"Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!
Earth's returns
For whole centuries of folly, noise, and sin!
Shut them in,
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!
Love is best."

Another lover, in _My Star_, pours lyric disdain upon his friends for
whose purblind common-sense vision the star which to him "dartled red
and blue," now a bird, now a flower, was just--a star. More finely
touched than either of these is _By the Fireside_. After _One Word
More_, to which it is obviously akin, it is Browning's most perfect
rendering of the luminous inner world, all-sufficing and self-contained,
of a rapturous love. The outer world is here neither thrust aside nor
fantastically varied; it is drawn into the inner world by taking its hue
and becoming the confidant and executant of its will. A landscape so
instinct with the hushed awe of expectation and with a mystic tenderness
is hardly to be found elsewhere save in _Christabel_,--

"We two stood there with never a third,
But each by each, as each knew well:
The sights we saw and the sounds we heard,
The lights and the shades made up a spell,
Till the trouble grew and stirred.

* *