Others may need new life in Heaven—­
      Man, Nature, Art—­made new, assume! 
    Man with new mind old sense to leaven,
      Nature—­new light to clear old gloom,
    Art that breaks bounds, gets soaring-room.

    I shall pray:  “Fugitive as precious—­
      Minutes which passed,—­return, remain! 
    Let earth’s old life once more enmesh us,
      You with old pleasure, me—­old pain,
      So we but meet nor part again!”

Nor was this reversion to the passion of youthful love altogether a new departure.  The lyrics in Ferishtah’s Fancies are written to represent, from the side of emotion, the intellectual and ethical ideas worked out in the poems.  The greater number of them are beautiful, and they would gain rather than lose if they were published separately from the poems.  Some are plainly of the same date as the poems.  Others, I think, were written in Browning’s early time, and the preceding poems are made to fit them.  But whatever be their origin, they nearly all treat of love, and one of them with a crude claim on the love of the senses alone, as if that—­as if the love of the body, even alone—­were not apart from the consideration of a poet who wished to treat of the whole of human nature.  Browning, when he wished to make a thought or a fact quite plain, frequently stated it without any of its modifications, trusting to his readers not to mistake him; knowing indeed, that if they cared to find the other side—­in this case the love which issues from the senses and the spirit together, or from the spirit alone—­they would find it stated just as soundly and clearly.  He meant us to combine both statements, and he has done so himself with regard to love.

When, however, we have considered these exceptions, it still remains curious how little the passionate Love-poem, with its strong personal touch, exists in Browning’s poetry.  One reason may be that Love-poems of this kind are naturally lyrical, and demand a sweet melody in the verse, and Browning’s genius was not especially lyrical, nor could he inevitably command a melodious movement in his verse.  But the main reason is that he was taken up with other and graver matters, and chiefly with the right theory of life; with the true relation of God and man; and with the picturing—­for absolute Love’s sake, and in order to win men to love one another by the awakening of pity—­of as much of humanity as he could grasp in thought and feeling.  Isolated and personal love was only a small part of this large design.

One personal love, however, he possessed fully and intensely.  It was his love for his wife, and three poems embody it.  The first is By the Fireside.  It does not take rank as a true love lyric; it is too long, too many-motived for a lyric.  It is a meditative poem of recollective tenderness wandering through the past; and no poem written on married love in England is more beautiful.