n pursuit of the averted
face--the one a _largo_, sad, persistent, dreamily hopeless; the other
impetuous, resolute, glad. The dreamier mood is elaborated in the
_Serenade at the Villa_ and _One Way of Love_. A few superbly
imaginative phrases bring the Italian summer night about us, sultry,
storm-shot, starless, still,--

"Life was dead, and so was light."

The Serenader himself is no child of Italy but a meditative Teuton, who,
Hamlet-like, composes for his mistress the answer which he would not
have her give. The lover in _One Way of Love_ is something of a Teuton
too, and has thoughts which break the vehemence of the impact of his
fate. But there is a first moment when he gasps and knits himself closer
to endure--admirably expressed in the sudden change to a brief trochaic
verse; then the grim mood is dissolved in a momentary ecstasy of
remembrance or of idea--and the verse, too, unfolds and releases itself
in sympathy:--

"She will not hear my music? So!
Break the string; fold music's wing;
Suppose Pauline had bade me sing!"

Or, instead of this systole and diastole alternation, the glory and the
pang are fused and interpenetrated in a continuous mood. Such a mood
furnishes the spiritual woof of one of Browning's most consummate and
one of his loveliest lyrics, _The Last Ride Together_ and _Evelyn Hope_.
"How are we to take it?" asks Mr Fotheringham of the latter. "As the
language of passion resenting death and this life's woeful
incompleteness? or as a prevision of the soul in a moment of intensest
life?" The question may be asked; yet the passion of regret which glows
and vibrates through it is too suffused with exalted faith in a final
recovery to find poignant expression. This lyric, with its taking
melody, has delighted thousands to whom Browning is otherwise "obscure,"
partly because it appeals with naive audacity at once to Romantic and to
Christian sentiment--combining the faith in love's power to seal its
object for ever as its own with the Christian faith in personal
immortality--a personal immortality in which there is yet marrying and
giving in marriage, as Romance demands. _The Last Ride Together_ has
attracted a different audience. Its passion is of a rarer and more
difficult kind, less accessible to the love and less flattering to the
faith of common minds. This lover dreams of no future recovery of more
than he still retains; his love, once for all, avails nothing; and t