Another poem of waiting love is In Three Days.  And this has the spirit of a true love lyric in it.  It reads like a personal thing; it breathes exaltation; it is quick, hurried, and thrilled.  The delicate fears of chance and change in the three days, or in the years to come, belong of right and nature to the waiting, and are subtly varied and condensed.  It is, however, the thoughtful love of a man who can be metaphysical in love, not the excluding mastery of passion.

Two in the Campagna is another poem in which love passes away into a deeper thought than love—­a strange and fascinating poem of twofold desire.  The man loves a woman and desires to be at peace with her in love, but there is a more imperative passion in his soul—­to rest in the infinite, in accomplished perfection.  And his livelong and vain pursuit of this has wearied him so much that he has no strength left to realise earthly love.  Is it possible that she who now walks with him in the Campagna can give him in her love the peace of the infinite which he desires, and if not, why—­where is the fault?  For a moment he seems to catch the reason, and asks his love to see it with him and to grasp it.  In a moment, like the gossamer thread he traces only to see it vanish, it is gone—­and nothing is left, save

    Infinite passion, and the pain
    Of finite hearts that yearn.

Least of all is the woman left.  She has quite disappeared.  This is not a Love-poem at all, it is the cry of Browning’s hunger for eternity in the midst of mortality, in which all the hunger for earthly love is burnt to dust.

The rest are chiefly studies of different kinds of love, or of crises in love; moments in its course, in its origin or its failure.  There are many examples in the shorter dramatic pieces, as In a Balcony; and even in the longer dramas certain sharp climaxes of love are recorded, not as if they belonged to the drama, but as if they were distinct studies introduced by chance or caprice.  In the short poems called “dramatic” these studies are numerous, and I group a few of them together according to their motives, leaving out some which I shall hereafter treat of when I come to discuss the women in Browning. Evelyn Hope has nothing to do with the passion of love.  The physical element of love is entirely excluded by the subject.  It is a beautiful expression of a love purely spiritual, to be realised in its fulness only after death, spirit with spirit, but yet to be kept as the master of daily life, to whose law all thought and action are referred.  The thought is noble, the expression of it simple, fine, and clear.  It is, moreover, close to truth—­there are hundreds of men who live quietly in love of that kind, and die in its embrace.

In Cristina the love is just as spiritual, but the motive of the poem is not one, as in Evelyn Hope, but two.  The woman is not dead, and she has missed her chance.  But the lover has not.  He has seen her and in a moment loved her.  She also looked on him and felt her soul matched by his as they “rushed together.”  But the world carried her away and she lost the fulness of life.  He, on the contrary, kept the moment for ever, and with it, her and all she might have been with him.