should have left the celebration of the love of woman behind him, and only written of the love which his Paracelsus images in Aprile.  It seems a little insensitive in so young a man.  But I do not think Browning was ever quite young save at happy intervals; and this falls in with the fact that his imagination was more intellectual than passionate; that while he felt love, he also analysed, even dissected it, as he wrote about it; that it scarcely ever carried him away so far as to make him forget everything but itself.  Perhaps once or twice, as in The Last Ride Together, he may have drawn near to this absorption, but even then the man is thinking more of his own thoughts than of the woman by his side, who must have been somewhat wearied by so silent a companion.  Even in By the Fireside, when he is praising the wife whom he loved with all his soul, and recalling the moment of early passion while yet they looked on one another and felt their souls embrace before they spoke—­it is curious to find him deviating from the intensity of the recollection into a discussion of what might have been if she had not been what she was—­a sort of excursus on the chances of life which lasts for eight verses—­before he returns to that immortal moment.  Even after years of married life, a poet, to whom passion has been in youth supreme, would scarcely have done that.  On the whole, his poetry, like that of Wordsworth, but not so completely, is destitute of the love-poem in the ordinary sense of the word; and the few exceptions to which we might point want so much that exclusiveness of a lover which shuts out all other thought but that of the woman, that it is difficult to class them in that species of literature.  However, this is not altogether true, and the main exception to it is a curious-piece of literary and personal history.  Those who read Asolando, the last book of poems he published, were surprised to find with what intensity some of the first poems in it described the passion of sexual love.  They are fully charged with isolated emotion; other thoughts than those of love do not intrude upon them.  Moreover, they have a sincere lyric note.  It is impossible, unless by a miracle of imagination, that these could have been written when he was about eighty years of age.  I believe, though I do not know, that he wrote them when he was quite a young man; that he found them on looking over his portfolios, and had a dim and scented pleasure in reading and publishing them in his old age.  He mentions in the preface that the book contains both old and new poems.  The new are easily isolated, and the first poem, the introduction to the collection, is of the date of the book.  The rest belong to different periods of his life.  The four poems to which I refer are Now, Summum Bonum, A Pearl—­A Girl, and Speculative.  They are beautiful with a beauty of their own; full of that natural abandonment of the whole world for