But, after all, this love may be no more than an adventure of the boulevard and the attic in the manner of Beranger’s gay Bohemianism.  The distance is wide between such elan of youthful passion and the fidelity which is inevitable, and on which age has set its seal, in that poem of perfect attainment, By the Fireside.  This is the love which completes the individual life and at the same time incorporates it with the life of humanity, which unites as one the past and the present, and which, owing no allegiance of a servile kind to time, becomes a pledge for futurity.  Browning’s personal experience is here taken up into his imagination and transfigured, but its substance remains what it had been in literal fact.

The poems of failure are more numerous, and they range through various degrees and kinds of failure.  It is not death which can bring the sense of failure to love.  In Evelyn Hope all the passion has been on the man’s side; all possibilities of love in the virginal heart of the dead girl, all her warmth and sweetness, had been folded in the bud.  But death, in the mood of infinite tenderness and unfulfilled aspiration which the poem expresses, seems no bar to some far-off attainment, of which the speaker’s passion, breaking through time, is the assurance, an attainment the nature of which he cannot divine but which will surely explain the meaning of things that are now obscure.  Perhaps the saddest and the most hopeless kind of failure is that in which, to borrow an image from the old allegory, the arrow of love all but flies to the mark and yet just misses it.  This is the subject of a poem equally admirable in its descriptive and its emotional passages, Two in the Campagna.  The line “One near one is too far,” might serve as its motto.  Satisfaction is all but reached and never can be reached.  Two hearts touch and never can unite.  One drop of the salt estranging sea is as unplumbed as the whole ocean.  And the only possible end is

     Infinite passion, and the pain
    Of finite hearts that yearn.[65]

Compared with such a failure as this an offer of love rejected, rejected with decision but not ungenerously, may be accounted a success.  There is something tonic to a brave heart in the putting forth of will, even though it encounter an obstacle which cannot be removed.  Such is the mood which is presented in One Way of Love; the foiled lover has at least made his supreme effort; it has been fruitless, but he thinks with satisfaction that he has played boldly for the prize, and never can he say that it was not worth risking all on the bare chance of success: 

    She will not give me heaven?  ’Tis well! 
    Lose who may—­I still can say
    Those who win heaven, blest are they!