semble those
of youth, whether moral or immoral. These celebrate the joys and
sorrows, rapture and despair, changes and chances, moods, fancies, and
imaginations, quips and cranks and wanton wiles, all the tragedy and
comedy, of that passion, which is half of the sense and half of the
spirit, sometimes wholly of the senses and sometimes wholly of the
spirit. It began, in one form of it, among the lower animals and still
rules their lives; it has developed through many thousand years of
humanity into myriads of shapes in and outside of the soul; into stories
whose varieties and multitudes are more numerous than the stars of
heaven or the sand of the seashore; and yet whose multitudinous changes
and histories have their source in two things only--in the desire to
generate, which is physical; in the desire to forget self in another,
which is spiritual. The union of both these desires into one passion of
thought, act and feeling is the fine quintessence of this kind of love;
but the latter desire alone is the primal motive of all the other forms
of love, from friendship and maternal love to love of country, of
mankind, of ideas, and of God.

With regard to love-poems of the sort we now discuss, the times in
history when they are most written are those in which a nation or
mankind renews its youth. Their production in the days of Elizabeth was
enormous, their passion various and profound, their fancy elaborate,
their ornament extravagant with the extravagance of youth; and, in the
hands of the greater men, their imagination was as fine as their melody.
As that age grew older they were not replaced but were dominated by more
serious subjects; and though love in its fantasies was happily recorded
in song during the Caroline period, passion in English love-poetry
slowly decayed till the ideas of the Revolution, before the French
outbreak, began to renew the youth of the world. The same career is run
by the individual poet. The subject of his youth is the passion of love,
as it was in Browning's _Pauline_. The subjects of his manhood are
serious with other thought and feeling, sad with another sadness, happy
with another happiness. They traverse a wider range of human feeling and
thought, and when they speak of love, it is of love in its wiser,
steadier, graver and less selfish forms. It was so with Browning, who
far sooner than his comrades, escaped from the tangled wilderness of
youthful passion. It is curious to think that so