eless kind of failure is that in which, to borrow an
image from the old allegory, the arrow of love all but flies to the mark
and yet just misses it. This is the subject of a poem equally admirable
in its descriptive and its emotional passages, _Two in the Campagna_.
The line "One near one is too far," might serve as its motto.
Satisfaction is all but reached and never can be reached. Two hearts
touch and never can unite. One drop of the salt estranging sea is as
unplumbed as the whole ocean. And the only possible end is

Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.[65]

Compared with such a failure as this an offer of love rejected, rejected
with decision but not ungenerously, may be accounted a success. There is
something tonic to a brave heart in the putting forth of will, even
though it encounter an obstacle which cannot be removed. Such is the
mood which is presented in _One Way of Love_; the foiled lover has at
least made his supreme effort; it has been fruitless, but he thinks with
satisfaction that he has played boldly for the prize, and never can he
say that it was not worth risking all on the bare chance of success:

She will not give me heaven? 'Tis well!
Lose who may--I still can say
Those who win heaven, blest are they!

So, too, in _The Last Ride together_, the lover is defeated but he is
not cast down, and he remains magnanimous throughout the grief of
defeat. Who in this our life--he reflects--statesman or soldier,
sculptor or poet, attains his complete ideal? He has been granted the
grace of one hour by his mistress' side, and he will carry the grateful
recollection of this with him into the future as his inalienable and his
best possession. With these generous rejections and magnanimous
acceptances of failure stands in contrast _A Serenade at the Villa_,
where the lover's devotion is met only by obdurate insensibility or,
worse, by an irritated sense of the persecution and plague of such love,
and where all things seem to conspire to leave his pain mere pain,
bitter and unredeemed.

In these examples, though love has been frustrated in its aim, the cause
of failure did not lie in any infirmity of the lover's heart or will.
But what if the will itself be supine, what if it dallies and delays,
consults the convenience of occasions, observes the indications of a
shallow prudence, slackens its pace towards the goal, and meanwhile the
passion languishes and grows pa