“Oh moment, one and infinite! 
        The water slips o’er stock and stone;
      The West is tender, hardly bright: 
        How grey at once is the evening grown—­
      One star, its chrysolite!

* * * * *

      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!”

But the poet who lingered over these moments of suspended fate did not usually choose the harmonious solution of them.  The “little less” of incomplete response might “suspend the breath” of the lover, but it was an inexhaustible inspiration to the poet.  It provokes, for instance, the delicate symbolism of the twin lyrics Love in a Life and Life in a Love, variations on the same theme—­vain pursuit of the averted face—­the one a largo, sad, persistent, dreamily hopeless; the other impetuous, resolute, glad.  The dreamier mood is elaborated in the Serenade at the Villa and One Way of Love.  A few superbly imaginative phrases bring the Italian summer night about us, sultry, storm-shot, starless, still,—­

     “Life was dead, and so was light.”

The Serenader himself is no child of Italy but a meditative Teuton, who, Hamlet-like, composes for his mistress the answer which he would not have her give.  The lover in One Way of Love is something of a Teuton too, and has thoughts which break the vehemence of the impact of his fate.  But there is a first moment when he gasps and knits himself closer to endure—­admirably expressed in the sudden change to a brief trochaic verse; then the grim mood is dissolved in a momentary ecstasy of remembrance or of idea—­and the verse, too, unfolds and releases itself in sympathy:—­

     “She will not hear my music?  So! 
        Break the string; fold music’s wing;
      Suppose Pauline had bade me sing!”

Or, instead of this systole and diastole alternation, the glory and the pang are fused and interpenetrated in a continuous mood.  Such a mood furnishes the spiritual woof of one of Browning’s most consummate and one of his loveliest lyrics, The Last Ride Together and Evelyn Hope.  “How are we to take it?” asks Mr Fotheringham of the latter.  “As the language of passion resenting death and this life’s woeful incompleteness? or as a prevision of the soul in a moment of intensest life?” The question may be asked; yet the passion of regret which glows and vibrates through it is too suffused with exalted faith in a final recovery to find poignant expression.  This lyric, with its taking melody, has delighted thousands to whom Browning is otherwise “obscure,” partly because it appeals with naive audacity at once to Romantic and to Christian sentiment—­combining the faith in love’s power to seal its object for