I knew thy grace.
I looked at Cercolas and saw thine eyes,
But never wholly, soul and body mine
Didst thou bid any love me as I loved.

The last two lines suggest another reason for the fickleness, as well as
for the insatiability of the poet's love. If the poet's genius consists
of his peculiar capacity for love, then in proportion as he outsoars the
rest of humanity he will be saddened, if not disillusioned, by the
half-hearted return of his love. Mrs. Browning characterizes her
passion:

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal grace.

It is clear that a lesser soul could not possibly give an adequate
response to such affection. Perhaps it is one of the strongest evidences
that Browning is a genuine philosopher, and not a prestidigitator of
philosophy in rhyme, that Mrs. Browning's love poetry does not conclude
with the note either of tragic insatiability or of disillusionment.
[Footnote: The tragedy of incapacity to return one's poet-lover's
passion is the theme of Alice Meynell's _The Poet and his Wife_. On
the same theme are the following: Amelia Josephine Burr, _Anne
Hathaway's Cottage_ (1914); C. J. Druce, _The Dark Lady to Shakespeare_
(1919); Karle Wilson Baker, _Keats and Fanny Brawne_ (1919); James B.
Kenyon, _Phaon concerning Sappho_ (1920).]

Since the poet's soul is more beautiful than the souls of other men, it
follows that he cannot love at all except, in a sense, by virtue of the
fact that he is easily deceived. Here is another explanation of the
transience of his affections,--in his horrified recoil from an unworthy
object that he has idealized. This blindness to sensuality is accounted
for by Plato in the figure, "The lover is his mirror in whom he is
beholding himself, but he is not aware of this." [Footnote: _Phaedrus_,
255.] [Footnote: Browning shows the poet, with his eyes open, loving an
unworthy form, in _Time's Revenges_.] This is the figure used in Sara
Teasdale's little poem, _The Star_, which says to the pool,

O wondrous deep,
I love you, I give you my light to keep.
Oh, more profound than the moving sea,
That never has shown myself to me.
* * * * *
But out of the woods as night grew cool
A brown pig came to the little pool;
It grunted and splashed and waded in
And the deepest place but reached its chin.

The tragedy in such love is