young a creature as he
was in 1833 should have left the celebration of the love of woman behind
him, and only written of the love which his _Paracelsus_ images in
Aprile. It seems a little insensitive in so young a man. But I do not
think Browning was ever quite young save at happy intervals; and this
falls in with the fact that his imagination was more intellectual than
passionate; that while he felt love, he also analysed, even dissected
it, as he wrote about it; that it scarcely ever carried him away so far
as to make him forget everything but itself. Perhaps once or twice, as
in _The Last Ride Together_, he may have drawn near to this absorption,
but even then the man is thinking more of his own thoughts than of the
woman by his side, who must have been somewhat wearied by so silent a
companion. Even in _By the Fireside_, when he is praising the wife whom
he loved with all his soul, and recalling the moment of early passion
while yet they looked on one another and felt their souls embrace before
they spoke--it is curious to find him deviating from the intensity of
the recollection into a discussion of what might have been if she had
not been what she was--a sort of _excursus_ on the chances of life which
lasts for eight verses--before he returns to that immortal moment. Even
after years of married life, a poet, to whom passion has been in youth
supreme, would scarcely have done that. On the whole, his poetry, like
that of Wordsworth, but not so completely, is destitute of the love-poem
in the ordinary sense of the word; and the few exceptions to which we
might point want so much that exclusiveness of a lover which shuts out
all other thought but that of the woman, that it is difficult to class
them in that species of literature. However, this is not altogether
true, and the main exception to it is a curious-piece of literary and
personal history. Those who read _Asolando_, the last book of poems he
published, were surprised to find with what intensity some of the first
poems in it described the passion of sexual love. They are fully charged
with isolated emotion; other thoughts than those of love do not intrude
upon them. Moreover, they have a sincere lyric note. It is impossible,
unless by a miracle of imagination, that these could have been written
when he was about eighty years of age. I believe, though I do not know,
that he wrote them when he was quite a young man; that he found them on
looking over his portfoli