* * *

A moment after, and hands unseen
Were hanging the night around us fast;
But we knew that a bar was broken between
Life and life: we were mixed at last
In spite of the mortal screen.

The forests had done it; there they stood;
We caught for a moment the powers at play:
They had mingled us so, for once and good,
Their work was done--we might go or stay,
They relapsed to their ancient mood."

_By the Fireside_ is otherwise memorable as portraying with whatever
disguise the Italian home-life of the poet and his wife. The famous
description of "the perfect wife" as she sat

"Musing by firelight, that great brow
And the spirit-small hand propping it,
Yonder, my heart knows how"--

remain among the most living portraitures of that exquisite but fragile
form. Yet neither here nor elsewhere did Browning care to dwell upon the
finished completeness of the perfect union. His intellectual thirst for
the problematic, and his ethical thirst for the incomplete, combined to
hurry him away to the moments of suspense, big with undecided or
unfulfilled fate. The lover among the ruins is awaiting his mistress;
the rapturous expectancy of another waiting lover is sung in _In Three
Days_. And from the fireside the poet wanders in thought from that
highest height of love which he has won to the mystic hour before he won
it, when the elements out of which his fate was to be resolved still
hung apart, awaiting the magical touch, which might never be given:--

"Oh moment, one and infinite!
The water slips o'er stock and stone;
The West is tender, hardly bright:
How grey at once is the evening grown--
One star, its chrysolite!

* * * * *

Oh, the little more, and how much it is!
And the little less, and what worlds away!
How a sound shall quicken content to bliss,
Or a breath suspend the blood's best play,
And life be a proof of this!"

But the poet who lingered over these moments of suspended fate did not
usually choose the harmonious solution of them. The "little less" of
incomplete response might "suspend the breath" of the lover, but it was
an inexhaustible inspiration to the poet. It provokes, for instance, the
delicate symbolism of the twin lyrics _Love in a Life_ and _Life in a
Love_, variations on the same theme--vai