he
secure faith of Evelyn's lover, that "God creates the love to reward the
love," is not his. His mistress will never "awake and remember and
understand." But that dead form he is permitted to clasp; and in the
rapture of that phantom companionship passion and thought slowly
transfigure and glorify his fate, till from the lone limbo of outcast
lovers he seems to have penetrated to the innermost fiery core of life,
which art and poetry grope after in vain--to possess that supreme moment
of earth which, prolonged, is heaven.

"What if heaven be that, fair and strong
At life's best, with our eyes upturned
Whither life's flower is first discerned,
We, fixed so, ever should so abide?
What if we still ride on, we two
With life for ever old yet new,
Changed not in kind but in degree,
The instant made eternity,--
And heaven just prove that I and she
Ride, ride together, for ever ride?"

The "glory of failure" is with Browning a familiar and inexhaustible
theme; but its spiritual abstraction here flushes with the human glory
of possession; the aethereal light and dew are mingled with breath and
blood; and in the wonderful long-drawn rhythm of the verse we hear the
steady stride of the horses as they bear their riders farther and
farther in to the visionary land of Romance.

It is only the masculine lover whom Browning allows thus to get the
better of unreturned love. His women have no such _remedia amoris_;
their heart's blood will not transmute into the ichor of poetry. It is
women almost alone who ever utter the poignancy of rejected love; in
them it is tragic, unreflecting, unconsolable, and merciless; while
something of his own elastic buoyancy of intellect, his supple optimism,
his analytic, dissipating fancy, infused itself into his portrayal of
the grief-pangs of his own sex. This distinction is very apparent in the
group of lyrics which deal with the less complete divisions of love. An
almost oppressive intensity of womanhood pulses in _A Woman's Last Word,
In a Year_, and _Any Wife to Any Husband_: the first, with its depth of
self-abasement and its cloying lilting melody, trembles, exquisite as it
is, on the verge of the "sentimental." There is a rarer, subtler pathos
in _Two in the Campagna_. The outward scene finds its way to his senses,
and its images make a language for his mood, or else they break sharply
across it and sting it to a cry. He feel