r four poems,
but fully expanded in _James Lee's Wife_, is the discovery, after years
of love, that love on one side is lost irretrievably. Another motive is,
that rather than lose love men or women will often sacrifice their
conscience, their reason, or their liberty. This sacrifice, of all that
makes our nobler being for the sake of personal love alone, brings with
it, because the whole being is degraded, the degradation, decay, and
death of personal love itself.

Another set of poems describes with fanciful charm, sometimes with happy
gaiety, love at play with itself. True love makes in the soul an
unfathomable ocean in whose depths are the imaginations of love,
serious, infinite, and divine. But on its surface the light of jewelled
fancies plays--a thousand thousand sunny memories and hopes, flying
thoughts and dancing feelings. A poet would be certain to have often
seen this happy crowd, and to desire to trick them out in song. So
Browning does in his poem, _In a Gondola_. The two lovers, with the dark
shadow of fate brooding over them, sing and muse and speak alternately,
imaging in swift and rival pictures made by fancy their deep-set love;
playing with its changes, creating new worlds in which to place it, but
always returning to its isolated individuality; recalling how it began,
the room where it reached its aim, the pictures, the furniture, the
balcony, her dress, all the scenery, in a hundred happy and glancing
pictures; while interlaced through their gaiety--and the gaiety made
keener by the nearness of dark fate--is coming death, death well
purchased by an hour of love. Finally, the lover is stabbed and slain,
and the pity of it throws back over the sunshine of love's fancies a
cloud of tears. This is the stuff of life that Browning loved to
paint--interwoven darkness and brightness, sorrow and joy trembling each
on the edge of the other, life playing at ball, as joyous as Nausicaa
and her maids, on a thin crust over a gulf of death.

Just such another poem--of the sportiveness of love, only this time in
memory, not in present pleasure, is to be found in _A Lovers' Quarrel_,
and the quarrel is the dark element in it. Browning always feels that
mighty passion has its root in tragedy, and that it seeks relief in
comedy. The lover sits by the fireside alone, and recalls, forgetting
pain for a moment, the joyful play they two had together, when love
expressed its depth of pleasure in dramatic fancies. Every s