order, as it were, to explain and justify their more
habitual sway. All the poetry in it is reached through the endeavour to
find speaking symbols for a love that cannot be told. The poet is a high
priest, entering with awed steps the sanctuary which even he cannot
tread without desecration save after divesting himself of all that is
habitual and of routine,--even the habits of his genius and the routine
of his art. Unable to divest himself of his poetry altogether, for he
has no other art, he lays aside his habitual dramatic guise to speak,
for once, not as Lippo, Roland, or Andrea, but "in his true person." And
he strips off the veil of his art and speaks in his own person only to
declare that speech is needless, and to fall upon that exquisite symbol
of an esoteric love uncommunicated and incommunicable to the
apprehension of the world,--the moon's other face with all its "silent
silver lights and darks," undreamed of by any mortal. "Heaven's gift
takes man's abatement," and poetry itself may only hint at the divinity
of perfect love. The _One Word More_ was written in September 1855,
shortly before the publication of the volume it closed, as the old moon
waned over the London roofs. Less than six years later the "moon of
poets" had passed for ever from his ken.

CHAPTER V.

LONDON. _DRAMATIS PERSONAE._

Ah, Love! but a day
And the world has changed!
The sun's away,
And the bird estranged.
--_James Lee's Wife_.

That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows,
Or decomposes but to recompose,
Become my universe that feels and knows.
--_Epilogue_.

The catastrophe of June 29, 1861, closed with appalling suddenness the
fifteen years' married life of Browning. "I shall grow still, I hope,"
he wrote to Miss Haworth, a month later, "but my root is taken, and
remains." The words vividly express the valour in the midst of
desolation which animated one little tried hitherto by sorrow. The
Italian home was shattered, and no thought of even attempting a
patched-up existence in its ruined walls seems to have occurred to him;
even the neighbourhood of the spot in which all that was mortal of her
had been laid had no power to detain him. But his departure was no mere
flight from scenes intolerably dear. He had their child to educate and
his own life to fulfil, and he set himself with grim resolution to the
work, as one who had indeed _had everything_, but wh