Last Ride Together, and The Lost Mistress; and on the other hand, the artists and lovers who fail for want of this saving energy, like the Duke and Lady of the Statue and the Bust, like Andrea del Sarto and the Unknown Painter.  But his very preoccupation with Art and with Love itself sprang mainly from his peculiar joy in the ardent putting-forth of soul.  No kind of vivid consciousness was indifferent to him, but the luxurious receptivity of the spectator or of a passively beloved mistress touched him little, compared with the faintest pulsation of the artist’s “love of loving, rage of knowing, feeling, seeing the absolute truth of things,” of the lover’s passion for union with another soul.  When he describes effects of music or painting, he passes instinctively over to the standpoint of the composer or the performer; shows us Hugues and Andrea themselves at the organ, or the easel; and instead of feeling the world turned into “an unsubstantial faery place” by the magic of the cuckoo or the thrush, strikes out playful theories of the professional methods of these songsters,—­the cuckoo’s monopoly of the “minor third,” the thrush’s wise way of repeating himself “lest you should think he never could recapture his first fine careless rapture.”  Suffering enters Browning’s poetry almost never as the artless wail of the helpless stricken thing; the intolerable pathos of Ye Banks and Braes, or of

     “We twa hae paidl’t in the burn
      Frae morning sun till dine,”

belonged to a side of primitive emotion to which “artificial” poets like Tennyson were far more sensitive than he.  Suffering began to interest him when the wail passed into the fierceness of vindictive passion, as in The Confessional, or into the outward calm of a self-subjugated spirit, as in Any Wife to any Husband, or A Woman’s Last Word; or into reflective and speculative, if bitter, retrospect, as in The Worst of It or James Lee’s Wife.  And happiness, equally,—­even the lover’s happiness,—­needed, to satisfy Browning, to have some leaven of challenging disquiet; the lover must have something to fear, or something to forgive, some hostility, or guilt, or absence, or death, to brave.  Or the rapturous union of lovers must be remembered with a pang, when they have quarrelled; or its joy be sobered by recalling the perilous hairbreadth chances incurred in achieving it (By the Fireside)—­

     “Oh, the little more, and how much it is! 
        And the little less, and what worlds away! 
      How a sound shall quicken content to bliss,
        Or a breath suspend the blood’s best play,
          And life be a proof of this!”