one moment with the woman loved, which youth and the hours of youth in manhood feel.  I should have been sorry if Browning had not shaped into song this abandonment.  He loved the natural, and was convinced of its rightness; and he had, as I might prove, a tenderness for it even when it passed into wrong.  He was the last man in the world to think that the passion of noble sexual love was to be despised.  And it is pleasant to find, at the end of his long poetic career, that, in a serious and wise old age, he selected, to form part of his last book, poems of youthful and impassioned love, in which the senses and the spirit met, each in their pre-eminence.

The two first of these, Now and Summum Bonum, must belong to his youth, though from certain turns of expression and thought in them, it seems that Browning worked on them at the time he published them.  I quote the second for its lyric charm, even though the melody is ruthlessly broken,

    All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee: 
      All the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one gem: 
    In the core of one pearl all the shade and the shine of the sea: 
      Breath and bloom, shade and shine,—­wonder, wealth, and
        —­how far above them—­
          Truth, that’s brighter than gem,
          Trust, that’s purer than pearl,—­
    Brightest truth, purest trust in the universe—­all were for me
          In the kiss of one girl.

The next two poems are knit to this and to Now by the strong emotion of earthly love, of the senses as well as of the spirit, for one woman; but they differ in the period at which they were written.  The first, A Pearl—­A Girl, recalls that part of the poem By the Fireside, when one look, one word, opened the infinite world of love to Browning.  If written when he was young, it has been revised in after life.

    A simple ring with a single stone
      To the vulgar eye no stone of price: 
    Whisper the right word, that alone—­
      Forth starts a sprite, like fire from ice,
    And lo, you are lord (says an Eastern scroll)
    Of heaven and earth, lord whole and sole
      Through the power in a pearl.

    A woman (’tis I this time that say)
      With little the world counts worthy praise
    Utter the true word—­out and away
      Escapes her soul:  I am wrapt in blaze,
    Creation’s lord, of heaven and earth
    Lord whole and sole—­by a minute’s birth—­
      Through the love in a girl!

The second—­Speculative—­also describes a moment of love-longing, but has the characteristics of his later poetry.  It may be of the same date as the book, or not much earlier.  It may be of his later manhood, of the time when he lost his wife.  At any rate, it is intense enough.  It looks back on the love he has lost, on passion with the woman he loved.  And he would surrender all—­Heaven, Nature, Man, Art—­in this momentary fire of desire; for indeed such passion is momentary.  Momentariness is the essence of the poem.  “Even in heaven I will cry for the wild hours now gone by—­Give me back the Earth and Thyself.” Speculative, he calls it, in an after irony.