price:
Whisper the right word, that alone--
Forth starts a sprite, like fire from ice,
And lo, you are lord (says an Eastern scroll)
Of heaven and earth, lord whole and sole
Through the power in a pearl.

A woman ('tis I this time that say)
With little the world counts worthy praise
Utter the true word--out and away
Escapes her soul: I am wrapt in blaze,
Creation's lord, of heaven and earth
Lord whole and sole--by a minute's birth--
Through the love in a girl!

The second--_Speculative_--also describes a moment of love-longing, but
has the characteristics of his later poetry. It may be of the same date
as the book, or not much earlier. It may be of his later manhood, of
the time when he lost his wife. At any rate, it is intense enough. It
looks back on the love he has lost, on passion with the woman he loved.
And he would surrender all--Heaven, Nature, Man, Art--in this momentary
fire of desire; for indeed such passion is momentary. Momentariness is
the essence of the poem. "Even in heaven I will cry for the wild hours
now gone by--Give me back the Earth and Thyself." _Speculative_, he
calls it, in an after irony.

Others may need new life in Heaven--
Man, Nature, Art--made new, assume!
Man with new mind old sense to leaven,
Nature--new light to clear old gloom,
Art that breaks bounds, gets soaring-room.

I shall pray: "Fugitive as precious--
Minutes which passed,--return, remain!
Let earth's old life once more enmesh us,
You with old pleasure, me--old pain,
So we but meet nor part again!"

Nor was this reversion to the passion of youthful love altogether a new
departure. The lyrics in _Ferishtah's Fancies_ are written to represent,
from the side of emotion, the intellectual and ethical ideas worked out
in the poems. The greater number of them are beautiful, and they would
gain rather than lose if they were published separately from the poems.
Some are plainly of the same date as the poems. Others, I think, were
written in Browning's early time, and the preceding poems are made to
fit them. But whatever be their origin, they nearly all treat of love,
and one of them with a crude claim on the love of the senses alone, as
if that--as if the love of the body, even alone--were not apart from
the consideration of a poet who wished to treat of the whole of human
nature. Browning, when he wished to make a tho