est!

Leaving now these personal poems on Love, we come to those we may call
impersonal. They are poems about love, not in its simplicities, but in
its subtle moments--moments that Browning loved to analyse, and which he
informed not so much with the passion of love, as with his profound love
of human nature. He describes in them, with the seriousness of one who
has left youth behind, the moods of love, its changes, vagaries,
certainties, failures and conquests. It is a man writing, not of the
love of happy youth, but of love tossed on the stormy seas of manhood
and womanhood, and modified from its singular personal intensity by the
deeper thought, feeling and surprising chances of our mortal life. Love
does not stand alone, as in the true love lyric, but with many other
grave matters. As such it is a more interesting subject for Browning.
For Love then becomes full of strange turns, unexpected thoughts,
impulses unknown before creating varied circumstances, and created by
them; and these his intellectual spirituality delighted to cope with,
and to follow, labyrinth after labyrinth. I shall give examples of these
separate studies, which have always an idea beyond the love out of which
the poem arises. In some of them the love is finally absorbed in the
idea. In all of them their aim is beyond the love of which they speak.

_Love among the Ruins_ tells of a lover going to meet his sweetheart.
There are many poems with this expectant motive in the world of song,
and no motive has been written of with greater emotion. If we are to
believe these poems, or have ever waited ourselves, the hour contains
nothing but her presence, what she is doing, how she is coming, why she
delays, what it will be when she comes--a thousand things, each like
white fire round her image. But Browning's lover, through nine verses,
cares only for the wide meadows over which he makes his way and the
sheep wandering over them, and their flowers and the ruins in the midst
of them; musing on the changes and contrasts of the world--the lonely
land and the populous glory which was of old in the vast city. It is
only then, and only in two lines, that he thinks of the girl who is
waiting for him in the ruined tower. Even then his imagination cannot
stay with her, but glances from her instantly--thinking that the ancient
king stood where she is waiting, and looked, full of pride, from the
high tower on his splendid city. When he has elaborated this second