In the _Ponte dell' Angela,
Venice_, we find one of the old grotesques, but more loosely "hitched
into rhyme" (it is his own word) than the better among those poems which
it most resembles. But there is something not precisely similar to
anything that had gone before in the dainty simplicity, the frank,
beautiful fervour, of such lyrics as _Summum Bonum_, in which exquisite
expression is given to the merely normal moods of ordinary affection. In
most of Browning's love poems the emotion is complex, the situation more
or less exceptional. It is to this that they owe their singular,
penetrating quality of charm. But there is a charm of another kind, and
a more generally appreciated one,

"that commonplace
Perfection of honest grace,"

which lies in the expression of feelings common to everyone, feelings
which everyone can without difficulty make or imagine his own. In the
lyrics to which I am referring, Browning has spoken straight out, in
just this simple, direct way, and with a delicate grace and smoothness
of rhythm not always to be met with in his later work. Here is a poem
called _Speculative_:

"Others may need new life in Heaven--
Man, Nature, Art--made new, assume!
Man with new mind old sense to leaven,
Nature--new light to clear old gloom,
Art that breaks bounds, gets soaring-room.

I shall pray: 'Fugitive as precious--
Minutes which passed--return, remain!
Let earth's old life once more enmesh us,
You with old pleasure, me--old pain,
So we but meet nor part again.'"

How hauntingly does that give voice to the instinctive, the universal
feeling! the lover's intensity of desire for the loved and lost one, for
herself, the "little human woman full of sin," for herself, unchanged,
unglorified, as she was on earth, not as she may be in a vague heaven.
To the lover in _Summum Bonum_ all the delight of life has been
granted; it lies in "the kiss of one girl," and that has been his. In
the delicious little poem called _Humility_, the lover is content in
being "proudly less," a thankful pensioner on the crumbs of love's
feast, laid for another. In _White Witchcraft_ love has outlived injury;
in the first of the _Bad Dreams_ it has survived even heart-break.

"Last night I saw you in my sleep:
And how your charm of face was changed!
I asked 'Some love, some faith you keep?'
You answered, 'Faith gone