pay glad life’s arrears
      Of pain, darkness and cold. 
    For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
      The black minute’s at end,
    And the elements’ rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
      Shall dwindle, shall blend,
    Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
      Then a light, then thy breast,
    O thou soul of my soul!  I shall clasp thee again,
      And with God be the rest!

Leaving now these personal poems on Love, we come to those we may call impersonal.  They are poems about love, not in its simplicities, but in its subtle moments—­moments that Browning loved to analyse, and which he informed not so much with the passion of love, as with his profound love of human nature.  He describes in them, with the seriousness of one who has left youth behind, the moods of love, its changes, vagaries, certainties, failures and conquests.  It is a man writing, not of the love of happy youth, but of love tossed on the stormy seas of manhood and womanhood, and modified from its singular personal intensity by the deeper thought, feeling and surprising chances of our mortal life.  Love does not stand alone, as in the true love lyric, but with many other grave matters.  As such it is a more interesting subject for Browning.  For Love then becomes full of strange turns, unexpected thoughts, impulses unknown before creating varied circumstances, and created by them; and these his intellectual spirituality delighted to cope with, and to follow, labyrinth after labyrinth.  I shall give examples of these separate studies, which have always an idea beyond the love out of which the poem arises.  In some of them the love is finally absorbed in the idea.  In all of them their aim is beyond the love of which they speak.

Love among the Ruins tells of a lover going to meet his sweetheart.  There are many poems with this expectant motive in the world of song, and no motive has been written of with greater emotion.  If we are to believe these poems, or have ever waited ourselves, the hour contains nothing but her presence, what she is doing, how she is coming, why she delays, what it will be when she comes—­a thousand things, each like white fire round her image.  But Browning’s lover, through nine verses, cares only for the wide meadows over which he makes his way and the sheep wandering over them, and their flowers and the ruins in the midst of them; musing on the changes and contrasts of the world—­the lonely land and the populous glory which was of old in the vast city.  It is only then, and only in two lines, that he thinks of the girl who is waiting for him in the ruined tower.  Even then his imagination cannot stay with her, but glances from her instantly—­thinking that the ancient king stood where she is waiting, and looked, full of pride, from the high tower on his splendid city.  When he has elaborated this second excursion of thought he comes at last to the girl.  Then is the hour of passion, but even in its fervour he draws a conclusion, belonging to a higher world than youthful love, as remote from it as his description of the scenery and the ruins.  “Splendour of arms, triumph of wealth, centuries of glory and pride, they are nothing to love.  Love is best.”  It is a general, not a particular conclusion.  In a true Love-poem it would be particular.