os, and had a dim and scented pleasure in
reading and publishing them in his old age. He mentions in the preface
that the book contains both old and new poems. The new are easily
isolated, and the first poem, the introduction to the collection, is of
the date of the book. The rest belong to different periods of his life.
The four poems to which I refer are _Now_, _Summum Bonum_, _A Pearl--A
Girl_, and _Speculative_. They are beautiful with a beauty of their own;
full of that natural abandonment of the whole world for one moment with
the woman loved, which youth and the hours of youth in manhood feel. I
should have been sorry if Browning had not shaped into song this
abandonment. He loved the natural, and was convinced of its rightness;
and he had, as I might prove, a tenderness for it even when it passed
into wrong. He was the last man in the world to think that the passion
of noble sexual love was to be despised. And it is pleasant to find, at
the end of his long poetic career, that, in a serious and wise old age,
he selected, to form part of his last book, poems of youthful and
impassioned love, in which the senses and the spirit met, each in their
pre-eminence.

The two first of these, _Now_ and _Summum Bonum_, must belong to his
youth, though from certain turns of expression and thought in them, it
seems that Browning worked on them at the time he published them. I
quote the second for its lyric charm, even though the melody is
ruthlessly broken,

All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee:
All the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one gem:
In the core of one pearl all the shade and the shine of the sea:
Breath and bloom, shade and shine,--wonder, wealth, and
--how far above them--
Truth, that's brighter than gem,
Trust, that's purer than pearl,--
Brightest truth, purest trust in the universe--all were for me
In the kiss of one girl.

The next two poems are knit to this and to _Now_ by the strong emotion
of earthly love, of the senses as well as of the spirit, for one woman;
but they differ in the period at which they were written. The first, _A
Pearl--A Girl_, recalls that part of the poem _By the Fireside_, when
one look, one word, opened the infinite world of love to Browning. If
written when he was young, it has been revised in after life.

A simple ring with a single stone
To the vulgar eye no stone of