Do you see this square old yellow book I toss
    I’ the air, and catch again, and twirl about
    By the crumpled vellum covers—­pure crude fact
    Secreted from man’s life when hearts beat hard
    And brains, high blooded, ticked two centuries hence? 
    Give it me back.  The thing’s restorative
    I’ the touch and sight.

But in his lyrics, it was not the steady development of life on which he loved to write, but the unexpected, original movement of life under the push of quick thought and sudden passion into some new form of action which broke through the commonplace of existence.  Men and women, and chiefly women, when they spoke and acted on a keen edge of life with a precipice below them or on the summit of the moment, with straight and clear intensity, and out of the original stuff of their nature—­were his darling lyric subjects.  And he did this work in lyrics, because the lyric is the poem of the moment.

There was one of these critical moments which attracted him greatly—­that in which all after-life is contained and decided; when a step to the right or left settles, in an instant, the spiritual basis of the soul.  I have already mentioned some of these poems—­those concerned with love, such as By the Fireside or Cristina—­and the woman is more prominent in them than the man.  One of the best of them, so far as the drawing of a woman is concerned, is Dis aliter visum.  We see the innocent girl, and ten years after what the world has made of her.  But the heart of the girl lies beneath the woman of the world.  And she recalls to the man the hour when they lingered near the church on the cliff; when he loved her, when he might have claimed her, and did not.  He feared they might repent of it; sacrificing to the present their chance of the eternities of love.  “Fool! who ruined four lives—­mine and your opera-dancer’s, your own and my husband’s!” Whether her outburst now be quite true to her whole self or not Browning does not let us know; but it is true to that moment of her, and it is full of the poetry of the moment she recalls.  Moreover, these thirty short verses paint as no other man could have done the secret soul of a woman in society.  I quote her outburst.  It is full of Browning’s keen poetry; and the first verse of it may well be compared with a similar moment in By the Fireside, where nature is made to play the same part, but succeeds as here she fails: 

    Now I may speak:  you fool, for all
      Your lore!  Who made things plain in vain? 
      What was the sea for?  What, the grey
      Sad church, that solitary day,
    Crosses and graves and swallows’ call?

    Was there nought better than to enjoy? 
      No feat which, done, would make time break,
      And let us pent-up creatures through
      Into eternity, our due? 
    No forcing earth teach heaven’s employ?