Commonly speaking, the term Love Poems does not mean poems concerning the absolute Love, or the love of Ideas, such as Truth or Beauty, or Love of mankind or one’s own country, or the loves that belong to home, or the love of friends, or even married love unless it be specially bound up, as it is in Browning’s poem of By the Fireside, with ante-nuptial love—­but poems expressing the isolating passion of one sex for the other; chiefly in youth, or in conditions which resemble those of youth, whether moral or immoral.  These celebrate the joys and sorrows, rapture and despair, changes and chances, moods, fancies, and imaginations, quips and cranks and wanton wiles, all the tragedy and comedy, of that passion, which is half of the sense and half of the spirit, sometimes wholly of the senses and sometimes wholly of the spirit.  It began, in one form of it, among the lower animals and still rules their lives; it has developed through many thousand years of humanity into myriads of shapes in and outside of the soul; into stories whose varieties and multitudes are more numerous than the stars of heaven or the sand of the seashore; and yet whose multitudinous changes and histories have their source in two things only—­in the desire to generate, which is physical; in the desire to forget self in another, which is spiritual.  The union of both these desires into one passion of thought, act and feeling is the fine quintessence of this kind of love; but the latter desire alone is the primal motive of all the other forms of love, from friendship and maternal love to love of country, of mankind, of ideas, and of God.

With regard to love-poems of the sort we now discuss, the times in history when they are most written are those in which a nation or mankind renews its youth.  Their production in the days of Elizabeth was enormous, their passion various and profound, their fancy elaborate, their ornament extravagant with the extravagance of youth; and, in the hands of the greater men, their imagination was as fine as their melody.  As that age grew older they were not replaced but were dominated by more serious subjects; and though love in its fantasies was happily recorded in song during the Caroline period, passion in English love-poetry slowly decayed till the ideas of the Revolution, before the French outbreak, began to renew the youth of the world.  The same career is run by the individual poet.  The subject of his youth is the passion of love, as it was in Browning’s Pauline.  The subjects of his manhood are serious with other thought and feeling, sad with another sadness, happy with another happiness.  They traverse a wider range of human feeling and thought, and when they speak of love, it is of love in its wiser, steadier, graver and less selfish forms.  It was so with Browning, who far sooner than his comrades, escaped from the tangled wilderness of youthful passion.  It is curious to think that so young a creature as he was in 1833