ltitude. I quote it, I cannot comment on it.

Never the time and the place
And the loved one all together!
This path--how soft to pace!
This May--what magic weather!
Where is the loved one's face?
In a dream that loved one's face meets mine
But the house is narrow, the place is bleak
Where, outside, rain and wind combine
With a furtive ear, if I strive to speak,
With a hostile eye at my flushing cheek,
With a malice that marks each word, each sign!
O enemy sly and serpentine,
Uncoil thee from the waking man!
Do I hold the Past
Thus firm and fast
Yet doubt if the Future hold I can?
This path so soft to pace shall lead
Through the magic of May to herself indeed!
Or narrow if needs the house must be,
Outside are the storms and strangers: we--
Oh, close, safe, warm sleep I and she,
--I and she!

That, indeed, is passionate enough.

Then there is another group--tales which embody phases of love. _Count
Gismond_ is one of these. It is too long, and wants Browning's usual
force. The outline of the story was, perhaps, too simple to interest his
intellect, and he needed in writing poetry not only the emotional
subject, but that there should be something in or behind the emotion
through the mazes of which his intelligence might glide like a
serpent.[10]

_The Glove_ is another of these tales--a good example of the brilliant
fashion in which Browning could, by a strange kaleidoscopic turn of his
subject, give it a new aspect and a new ending. The world has had the
tale before it for a very long time. Every one had said the woman was
wrong and the man right; but here, poetic juggler as he is, Browning
makes the woman right and the man wrong, reversing the judgment of
centuries. The best of it is, that he seems to hold the truth of the
thing. It is amusing to think that only now, in the other world, if she
and Browning meet, will she find herself comprehended.

Finally, as to the mightier kinds of love, those supreme forms of the
passion, which have neither beginning nor end; to which time and space
are but names; which make and fill the universe; the least grain of
which predicates the whole; the spirit of which is God Himself; the
breath of whose life is immortal joy, or sorrow which means joy; whose
vision is Beauty, and whose activity is Creation--these, united in G