Her soul’s mine:  and thus grown perfect,
    I shall pass my life’s remainder.

This is not the usual Love-poem.  It is a love as spiritual, as mystic, even more mystic, since the woman lives, than the lover felt for Evelyn Hope.

The second motive in Cristina of the lover who meets the true partner of his soul or hers, and either seizes the happy hour and possesses joy for ever, or misses it and loses all, is a favourite with Browning.  He repeats it frequently under diverse circumstances, for it opened out so many various endings, and afforded so much opportunity for his beloved analysis.  Moreover, optimist as he was in his final thought of man, he was deeply conscious of the ironies of life, of the ease with which things go wrong, of the impossibility of setting them right from without.  And in the matter of love he marks in at least four poems how the moment was held and life was therefore conquest.  Then in Youth and Art, in Dis Aliter Visum, in Bifurcation, in The Lost Mistress, and in Too Late, he records the opposite fate, and in characters so distinct that the repetition of the motive is not monotonous.  These are studies of the Might-have-beens of love.

Another motive, used with varied circumstance in three or four poems, but fully expanded in James Lee’s Wife, is the discovery, after years of love, that love on one side is lost irretrievably.  Another motive is, that rather than lose love men or women will often sacrifice their conscience, their reason, or their liberty.  This sacrifice, of all that makes our nobler being for the sake of personal love alone, brings with it, because the whole being is degraded, the degradation, decay, and death of personal love itself.

Another set of poems describes with fanciful charm, sometimes with happy gaiety, love at play with itself.  True love makes in the soul an unfathomable ocean in whose depths are the imaginations of love, serious, infinite, and divine.  But on its surface the light of jewelled fancies plays—­a thousand thousand sunny memories and hopes, flying thoughts and dancing feelings.  A poet would be certain to have often seen this happy crowd, and to desire to trick them out in song.  So Browning does in his poem, In a Gondola.  The two lovers, with the dark shadow of fate brooding over them, sing and muse and speak alternately, imaging in swift and rival pictures made by fancy their deep-set love; playing with its changes, creating new worlds in which to place it, but always returning to its isolated individuality; recalling how it began, the room where it reached its aim, the pictures, the furniture, the balcony, her dress, all the scenery, in a hundred happy and glancing pictures; while interlaced through their gaiety—­and the gaiety made keener by the nearness of dark fate—­is coming death, death well purchased by an hour of love.  Finally, the lover is stabbed and slain, and the pity of it throws back over the sunshine of love’s fancies a cloud of tears.  This is the stuff of life that Browning loved to paint—­interwoven darkness and brightness, sorrow and joy trembling each on the edge of the other, life playing at ball, as joyous as Nausicaa and her maids, on a thin crust over a gulf of death.