rded, this
vital piece of truth. It represents a whole type of character--those who
in a life of weary work keep their day of love, even when it has been
wrong, as their one poetic, ideal possession, and cherish it for ever.
The wrong of it disappears in the ideal beauty which now has gathered
round it, and as it was faithful, unmixed with other love, it escapes
degradation. We see, when the man images the past and its scenery out of
the bottles of physic on the table, how the material world had been
idealised to him all his life long by this passionate memory--

Do I view the world as a vale of tears?
Ah, reverend sir, not I.

It might be well to compare with this another treatment of the memory
of love in _St. Martin's Summer_. A much less interesting and natural
motive rules it than _Confessions_; and the characters, though more "in
society" than the dying man, are grosser in nature; gross by their
inability to love, or by loving freshly to make a new world in which the
old sorrow dies or is transformed. There is no humour in the thing,
though there is bitter irony. But there is humour in an earlier poem--_A
Serenade at the Villa_, where, in the last verse, the bitterness of
wrath and love together (a very different bitterness from that of _St.
Martin's Summer_), breaks out, and is attributed to the garden gate. The
night-watch and the singing is over; she must have heard him, but she
gave no sign. He wonders what she thought, and then, because he was only
half in love, flings away--

Oh how dark your villa was,
Windows fast and obdurate!
How the garden grudged me grass
Where I stood--the iron gate
Ground its teeth to let me pass!

It is impossible to notice all these studies of love, but they form,
together, a book of transient phases of the passion in almost every
class of society. And they show how Browning, passing through the world,
from the Quartier Latin to London drawing-rooms, was continually on the
watch to catch, store up, and reproduce a crowd of motives for poetry
which his memory held and his imagination shaped.

There is only one more poem, which I cannot pass by in this group of
studies. It is one of sacred and personal memory, so much so that it is
probable the loss of his life lies beneath it. It rises into that
highest poetry which fuses together into one form a hundred thoughts and
a hundred emotions, and which is only obscure from the mingling of their
mu