“I—­prison-bird, with a ruddy strife
        At breast, and a life whence storm-notes start—­
      Hold on, hope hard in the subtle thing
        That’s spirit:  though cloistered fast, soar free;
      Account as wood, brick, stone, this ring
        Of the rueful neighbours, and—­forth to thee!”

These stanzas finely hint at a second theme which wanders in and out among the strident notes of Browning’s anti-critical “apologetics.”  Of all the springs of poetry none lay deeper in Browning than love; to the last he could sing of love with the full inspiration of his best time; and the finest things in this volume are concerned with it.  But as compared with the love-lays of the Dramatic Lyrics or Men and Women there is something wistful, far off, even elegiac, in this love-poetry.  A barrier, undefinable but impassable, seems to part us from the full tide of youthful passion.  The richest in this tender sunset beauty is the St Martin’s Summer, where the late love is suddenly smitten with the discovery that its apparent warmth is a ghost of old passion buried but unallayed.  Again and again Browning here dwells upon the magic of love,—­as if love still retained for the ageing poet an isolated and exceptional irradiating power in a world fast fading into commonplace and prose.  The brief, exquisite snatches of song, Natural Magic, Magical Nature, are joyous tributes to the power of the charm, paid by one who remains master of his heart. Numpholeptos is the long-drawn enchanted reverie of one in the very toils of the spell—­a thing woven of dreams and emotions, dark-glowing, iridescent to the eye, languorous to the ear, impalpable to the analytic intellect.  In Bifurcation he puts again, with more of subtlety and of detachment, the problem of the conventional conflict of love with duty, so peremptorily decided in love’s favour in The Statue and the Bust. A Forgiveness is a powerful reworking of the theme of My Last Duchess, with an added irony of situation:  Browning, who excels in the drama of silent figures, has drawn none more effective than this guilty priest, who grinds his teeth behind the confessional grating as he listens perforce to the story of his own crime from the lips of the wronged husband, still cherishing the hope that he is unrecognised, or at the worst may elude vengeance in his cloister’s solitude; until the avenger’s last words throw off the mask:—­

     “Hardly, I think!  As little helped his brow
      The cloak then, Father—­as your grate helps now!”

From these high matters of passion and tragedy we pass by easy steps into the jocular-colloquial region in which the volume opened.  Painting in these later days of Browning’s has ceased to yield high, or even serious poetry, and Baldinucci’s tale of shabby trickery cannot be compared, even for grotesque humour, with the powerful grotesquerie of Holy-Cross Day, while it wholly lacks the great