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 lass loud, through its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!

PARTING.

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 following winter, when they were again at their Florentine home, Browning wrote his “Christmas Eve and Easter Day,” that remarkable apologia for Christianity, and close-reasoned presentation of the religious thought of the time.  It is, however, for this reason that it is so widely known and admired:  for it is ever easier to attract readers by dogma than by beauty, by intellectual argument than by the seduction of art.  Coincidently, Mrs. Browning wrote the first portion of “Casa Guidi Windows.”

In the spring of 1850 husband and wife spent a short stay in Rome.  I have been told that the poem entitled ‘Two in the Campagna’ was as actually personal as the already quoted “Guardian Angel.”  But I do not think stress should be laid on this and kindred localisations.  Exact or not, they have no literary value.  To the poet, the dramatic poet above all, locality and actuality of experience are, so to say, merely fortunate coigns of outlook, for the winged genius to temporally inhabit.  To the imaginative mind, truth is not simply actuality.  As for ‘Two in the Campagna’:  it is too universally true to be merely personal.  There is a gulf which not the profoundest search can fathom, which not the strongest-winged love can overreach:  the gulf of individuality.  It is those who have loved most deeply who recognise most acutely this always pathetic and often terrifying isolation of the soul.  None save the weak can believe in the absolute union of two spirits.  If this were demonstratable, immortality would be a palpable fiction.  The moment individuality can lapse to fusion, that moment the tide has ebbed, the wind has fallen, the dream has been dreamed.  So long as the soul remains inviolate amid all shock of time and change, so long is it immortal.  No man, no poet assuredly, could love as Browning loved, and fail to be aware, often with vague anger and bitterness, no doubt, of this insuperable isolation even when spirit seemed to leap to spirit, in the touch of a kiss, in the evanishing sigh of some one or other exquisite moment.  The poem tells us how the lovers, straying hand in hand one May day across the Campagna, sat down among the seeding grasses, content at first in the idle watching of a spider spinning her gossamer threads from yellowing fennel to other vagrant weeds.  All around them

     “The champaign with its endless fleece
        Of feathery grasses everywhere! 
      Silence and passion, joy and peace,
        An everlasting wash of air—­ ...