s the Campagna about him, with
its tranced immensity lying bare to heaven:--

"Silence and passion, joy and peace,
An everlasting wash of air-- ...
Such life here, through such length of hours,
Such miracles performed in play,
Such primal naked forms of flowers,
Such letting nature have her way
While heaven looks from its towers;"

and in the presence of that large sincerity of nature he would fain also
"be unashamed of soul" and probe love's wound to the core. But the
invisible barriers will not be put aside or transcended, and in the
midst of that "infinite passion" there remain "the finite hearts that
yearn." Or else he wakes after the quarrel in the blitheness of a bright
dawn:--

"All is blue again
After last night's rain,
And the South dries the hawthorn spray.
Only, my love's away!
I'd as lief that the blue were grey."

The disasters of love rarely, with Browning, stir us very deeply. His
temperament was too elastic, his intellect too resourceful, to enter
save by artificial processes into the mood of blank and hopeless grief.
Tragedy did not lie in his blood, and fortune--kinder to the man than to
the poet--had as yet denied him, in love, the "baptism of sorrow" which
has wrung immortal verse from the lips of frailer men. It may even be
questioned whether all Browning's poetry of love's tragedy will live as
long as a few stanzas of Musset's _Nuits_,--bare, unadorned verses,
devoid of fancy or wit, but intense and penetrating as a cry:--

"Ce soir encor je t'ai vu m'apparaitre,
C'etait par une triste nuit.
L'aile des vents battait a ma fenetre;
J'etais seul, courbe sur mon lit.
J'y regardais une place cherie,
Tiede encor d'un baiser brulant;
Et je songeais comme la femme oublie,
Et je sentais un lambeau de ma vie,
Qui se dechirait lentement.
Je rassemblais des lettres de la veille,
Des cheveux, des debris d'amour.
Tout ce passe me criait a l'oreille
Ses eternels serments d'un jour.
Je contemplais ces reliques sacrees,
Qui me faisaient trembler la main:
Larmes du coeur par le coeur devorees,
Et que les yeux qui les avaient pleurees
Ne reconnaitront plus demain!"[37]

[Footnote 37: Musset, _Nuit de decembre_.]

The same quest of the problematic which attracted Browning to the poetry
of pa