Just such another poem—­of the sportiveness of love, only this time in memory, not in present pleasure, is to be found in A Lovers’ Quarrel, and the quarrel is the dark element in it.  Browning always feels that mighty passion has its root in tragedy, and that it seeks relief in comedy.  The lover sits by the fireside alone, and recalls, forgetting pain for a moment, the joyful play they two had together, when love expressed its depth of pleasure in dramatic fancies.  Every separate picture is done in Browning’s impressionist way.  And when the glad memories are over, and the sorrow returns, passion leaps out—­

      It is twelve o’clock: 
      I shall hear her knock
    In the worst of a storm’s uproar,
      I shall pull her through the door,
    I shall have her for evermore!

This is partly a study of the memory of love; and Browning has represented, without any sorrow linked to it, memorial love in a variety of characters under different circumstances, so that, though the subject is the same, the treatment varies.  A charming instance of this is The Flowers Name; easy to read, happy in its fancy, in its scenery, in the subtle play of deep affection, in the character of its lover, in the character of the girl who is remembered—­a good example of Browning’s power to image in a few verses two human souls so clearly that they live in our world for ever. Meeting at Night—­Parting at Morning is another reminiscence, mixed up with the natural scenery of the meeting and parting, a vivid recollection of a fleeting night of passion, and then the abandonment of its isolation for a wider, fuller life with humanity.  I quote it for the fine impassioned way in which human feeling and natural scenery are fused together.

    MEETING AT NIGHT.

    The grey sea and the long black land;
      And the yellow half-moon large and low;
    And the startled little waves that leap
    In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
      As I gain the cove with pushing prow. 
    And quench its speed i’ the slushy sand. 
    Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
      Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
    A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
    And blue spurt of a lighted match,
      And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears. 
    Than the two hearts beating each to each!

    PARTING AT MORNING.

    Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,
      And the sun looked over the mountain’s rim: 
      And straight was a path of gold for him,
    And the need of a world of men for me.

The poem entitled Confessions is another of these memories, in which a dying man, careless of death, careless of the dull conventions of the clergyman, cares for nothing but the memory of his early passion for a girl one happy June, and dies in comfort of the sweetness of the memory, though he thinks—­