Of love poetry, on the other hand, there was little in these first Lyrics and Romances.  Browning had had warm friendships with women, and was singularly attractive to them; but at thirty-three love had at most sent a dancing ripple across the bright surface of his life, and it apparently counted for nothing in his dreams.  His plans, as he told Miss Barrett, had been made without any thought of “finding such a one as you.”  That discovery introduced a new and unknown factor into his scheme of things.  The love-poetry of the Dramatic Lyrics and Romances is still somewhat tentative and insecure.  The beautiful fantasia In a Gondola was directly inspired by a picture of his friend Maclise.  He paints the romance of the lover’s twilight tryst with all his incisive vigour; but his own pulse beats rather with the lover who goes forth at daybreak, and feels the kindling summons of the morning glory of sea and sunlight into the “world of men.”  His attitude to women is touched with the virginal reserve of the young Hippolytus, whose tragic fate he had told in the lofty Prologue of Artemis.  He approaches them with a kind of delicate and distant awe; tender, even chivalrous, but accentuating rather the reserves and reticences of chivalry than its rewards.  The lady of The Flower’s Name is beautiful, but her beauty is only shyly hinted; we see no feature of face or form; only the fold of her dress brushing against the box border, the “twinkling” of her white fingers among the dark leaves.  The typical lover of these lyrics is of a temperament in which feminine sensitiveness and masculine tenacity are characteristically blended; a temperament which the faintest and most fugitive signs of love—­a word, a glance, the impalpable music of a romantic name—­not only kindle and subdue, but permanently fortify and secure. Cristina, Rudel, and the Lost Mistress stand in a line of development which culminates in The Last Ride Together.  Cristina’s lover has but “changed eyes” with her; but no queenly scorn of hers can undo the spiritual transformation which her glance has wrought: 

     “Her soul’s mine; and thus, grown perfect,
      I shall pass my life’s remainder.”

The Lost Mistress is an exquisitely tender and pathetic farewell, but not the stifled cry of a man who has received a crushing blow.  Not easily, but yet without any ruinous convulsion, he makes that transition from love to “mere friendship” which passionate men so hardly endure.

The really tragic love-story was, for Browning, the story not of love rejected but of love flagging, fading, or crushed out.

     “Never fear, but there’s provision
      Of the devil’s to quench knowledge
      Lest on earth we walk in rapture,”