excursion of thought he comes at last to the girl. Then is the hour of
passion, but even in its fervour he draws a conclusion, belonging to a
higher world than youthful love, as remote from it as his description of
the scenery and the ruins. "Splendour of arms, triumph of wealth,
centuries of glory and pride, they are nothing to love. Love is best."
It is a general, not a particular conclusion. In a true Love-poem it
would be particular.

Another poem of waiting love is _In Three Days_. And this has the spirit
of a true love lyric in it. It reads like a personal thing; it breathes
exaltation; it is quick, hurried, and thrilled. The delicate fears of
chance and change in the three days, or in the years to come, belong of
right and nature to the waiting, and are subtly varied and condensed. It
is, however, the thoughtful love of a man who can be metaphysical in
love, not the excluding mastery of passion.

_Two in the Campagna_ is another poem in which love passes away into a
deeper thought than love--a strange and fascinating poem of twofold
desire. The man loves a woman and desires to be at peace with her in
love, but there is a more imperative passion in his soul--to rest in the
infinite, in accomplished perfection. And his livelong and vain pursuit
of this has wearied him so much that he has no strength left to realise
earthly love. Is it possible that she who now walks with him in the
Campagna can give him in her love the peace of the infinite which he
desires, and if not, why--where is the fault? For a moment he seems to
catch the reason, and asks his love to see it with him and to grasp it.
In a moment, like the gossamer thread he traces only to see it vanish,
it is gone--and nothing is left, save

Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.

Least of all is the woman left. She has quite disappeared. This is not a
Love-poem at all, it is the cry of Browning's hunger for eternity in the
midst of mortality, in which all the hunger for earthly love is burnt to
dust.

The rest are chiefly studies of different kinds of love, or of crises in
love; moments in its course, in its origin or its failure. There are
many examples in the shorter dramatic pieces, as _In a Balcony_; and
even in the longer dramas certain sharp climaxes of love are recorded,
not as if they belonged to the drama, but as if they were distinct
studies introduced by chance or caprice. In the short poems called
"dramatic" th