But the house is narrow, the place is bleak
    Where, outside, rain and wind combine
      With a furtive ear, if I strive to speak,
      With a hostile eye at my flushing cheek,
    With a malice that marks each word, each sign! 
        O enemy sly and serpentine,
        Uncoil thee from the waking man! 
          Do I hold the Past
          Thus firm and fast
        Yet doubt if the Future hold I can? 
      This path so soft to pace shall lead
      Through the magic of May to herself indeed! 
      Or narrow if needs the house must be,
      Outside are the storms and strangers:  we—­
      Oh, close, safe, warm sleep I and she,
     —­I and she!

That, indeed, is passionate enough.

Then there is another group—­tales which embody phases of love. Count Gismond is one of these.  It is too long, and wants Browning’s usual force.  The outline of the story was, perhaps, too simple to interest his intellect, and he needed in writing poetry not only the emotional subject, but that there should be something in or behind the emotion through the mazes of which his intelligence might glide like a serpent.[10]

The Glove is another of these tales—­a good example of the brilliant fashion in which Browning could, by a strange kaleidoscopic turn of his subject, give it a new aspect and a new ending.  The world has had the tale before it for a very long time.  Every one had said the woman was wrong and the man right; but here, poetic juggler as he is, Browning makes the woman right and the man wrong, reversing the judgment of centuries.  The best of it is, that he seems to hold the truth of the thing.  It is amusing to think that only now, in the other world, if she and Browning meet, will she find herself comprehended.

Finally, as to the mightier kinds of love, those supreme forms of the passion, which have neither beginning nor end; to which time and space are but names; which make and fill the universe; the least grain of which predicates the whole; the spirit of which is God Himself; the breath of whose life is immortal joy, or sorrow which means joy; whose vision is Beauty, and whose activity is Creation—­these, united in God, or divided among men into their three great entities—­love of ideas for their truth and beauty; love of the natural universe, which is God’s garment; love of humanity, which is God’s child—­these pervade the whole of Browning’s poetry as the heat of the sun pervades the earth and every little grain upon it.  They make its warmth and life, strength and beauty.  They are too vast to be circumscribed in a lyric, represented in a drama, bound up even in a long story of spiritual endeavour like Paracelsus.  But they move, in dignity, splendour and passion, through all that he deeply conceived and nobly wrought; and their triumph and immortality in his poetry are never for one moment clouded with doubt or subject to death.  This is the supreme thing in his work.  To him Love is the Conqueror, and Love is God.