e fact
Secreted from man's life when hearts beat hard
And brains, high blooded, ticked two centuries hence?
Give it me back. The thing's restorative
I' the touch and sight.

But in his lyrics, it was not the steady development of life on which he
loved to write, but the unexpected, original movement of life under the
push of quick thought and sudden passion into some new form of action
which broke through the commonplace of existence. Men and women, and
chiefly women, when they spoke and acted on a keen edge of life with a
precipice below them or on the summit of the moment, with straight and
clear intensity, and out of the original stuff of their nature--were his
darling lyric subjects. And he did this work in lyrics, because the
lyric is the poem of the moment.

There was one of these critical moments which attracted him
greatly--that in which all after-life is contained and decided; when a
step to the right or left settles, in an instant, the spiritual basis of
the soul. I have already mentioned some of these poems--those concerned
with love, such as _By the Fireside_ or _Cristina_--and the woman is
more prominent in them than the man. One of the best of them, so far as
the drawing of a woman is concerned, is _Dis aliter visum_. We see the
innocent girl, and ten years after what the world has made of her. But
the heart of the girl lies beneath the woman of the world. And she
recalls to the man the hour when they lingered near the church on the
cliff; when he loved her, when he might have claimed her, and did not.
He feared they might repent of it; sacrificing to the present their
chance of the eternities of love. "Fool! who ruined four lives--mine and
your opera-dancer's, your own and my husband's!" Whether her outburst
now be quite true to her whole self or not Browning does not let us
know; but it is true to that moment of her, and it is full of the poetry
of the moment she recalls. Moreover, these thirty short verses paint as
no other man could have done the secret soul of a woman in society. I
quote her outburst. It is full of Browning's keen poetry; and the first
verse of it may well be compared with a similar moment in _By the
Fireside_, where nature is made to play the same part, but succeeds as
here she fails:

Now I may speak: you fool, for all
Your lore! Who made things plain in vain?
What was the sea for? What, the grey
Sad church, that solitary day,
Crosses