How sad and bad and mad it was.

Few but Browning would have seen, and fewer still have recorded, this vital piece of truth.  It represents a whole type of character—­those who in a life of weary work keep their day of love, even when it has been wrong, as their one poetic, ideal possession, and cherish it for ever.  The wrong of it disappears in the ideal beauty which now has gathered round it, and as it was faithful, unmixed with other love, it escapes degradation.  We see, when the man images the past and its scenery out of the bottles of physic on the table, how the material world had been idealised to him all his life long by this passionate memory—­

    Do I view the world as a vale of tears? 
      Ah, reverend sir, not I.

It might be well to compare with this another treatment of the memory of love in St. Martin’s Summer.  A much less interesting and natural motive rules it than Confessions; and the characters, though more “in society” than the dying man, are grosser in nature; gross by their inability to love, or by loving freshly to make a new world in which the old sorrow dies or is transformed.  There is no humour in the thing, though there is bitter irony.  But there is humour in an earlier poem—­A Serenade at the Villa, where, in the last verse, the bitterness of wrath and love together (a very different bitterness from that of St. Martin’s Summer), breaks out, and is attributed to the garden gate.  The night-watch and the singing is over; she must have heard him, but she gave no sign.  He wonders what she thought, and then, because he was only half in love, flings away—­

    Oh how dark your villa was,
      Windows fast and obdurate! 
    How the garden grudged me grass
      Where I stood—­the iron gate
    Ground its teeth to let me pass!

It is impossible to notice all these studies of love, but they form, together, a book of transient phases of the passion in almost every class of society.  And they show how Browning, passing through the world, from the Quartier Latin to London drawing-rooms, was continually on the watch to catch, store up, and reproduce a crowd of motives for poetry which his memory held and his imagination shaped.

There is only one more poem, which I cannot pass by in this group of studies.  It is one of sacred and personal memory, so much so that it is probable the loss of his life lies beneath it.  It rises into that highest poetry which fuses together into one form a hundred thoughts and a hundred emotions, and which is only obscure from the mingling of their multitude.  I quote it, I cannot comment on it.

        Never the time and the place
          And the loved one all together! 
        This path—­how soft to pace! 
          This May—­what magic weather! 
        Where is the loved one’s face? 
    In a dream that loved one’s face meets mine