So, too, in The Last Ride together, the lover is defeated but he is not cast down, and he remains magnanimous throughout the grief of defeat.  Who in this our life—­he reflects—­statesman or soldier, sculptor or poet, attains his complete ideal?  He has been granted the grace of one hour by his mistress’ side, and he will carry the grateful recollection of this with him into the future as his inalienable and his best possession.  With these generous rejections and magnanimous acceptances of failure stands in contrast A Serenade at the Villa, where the lover’s devotion is met only by obdurate insensibility or, worse, by an irritated sense of the persecution and plague of such love, and where all things seem to conspire to leave his pain mere pain, bitter and unredeemed.

In these examples, though love has been frustrated in its aim, the cause of failure did not lie in any infirmity of the lover’s heart or will.  But what if the will itself be supine, what if it dallies and delays, consults the convenience of occasions, observes the indications of a shallow prudence, slackens its pace towards the goal, and meanwhile the passion languishes and grows pale from day to day, until the day of love has waned, and the passion dies in a twilight hour through mere inanition?  Such a failure as this seems to Browning to mean the perishing of a soul, or of more souls than one.  He takes in The Statue and the Bust a case where the fulfilment of passion would have been a crime.  The lady is a bride of the Riccardi; to win her, now a wedded wife, would be to violate the law of God and man.  Nevertheless it is her face which has “filled the empty sheath of a man” with a blade for a knight’s adventure—­The

    Duke grew straightway brave and wise.

And then follow delays of convenience, excuses, postponements, and the Duke’s flood of passion dwindles to a thread, and is lost in the sandy flats of life: 

    So weeks grew months, years; gleam by gleam
    The glory dropped from their youth and love,
    And both perceived they had dreamed a dream.

Their end was a crime, but Browning’s contention is that a crime may serve for a test as well as a virtue; in that test the Duke and the lady had alike failed through mere languor of soul: 

    And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost
    Is—­the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin,
    Though the end in sight was a vice, I say.

Had Tennyson treated the same subject he would probably have glorified their action as a victorious obedience to the law of self-reverence and self-control.