ever as its own with the Christian faith in personal immortality—­a personal immortality in which there is yet marrying and giving in marriage, as Romance demands. The Last Ride Together has attracted a different audience.  Its passion is of a rarer and more difficult kind, less accessible to the love and less flattering to the faith of common minds.  This lover dreams of no future recovery of more than he still retains; his love, once for all, avails nothing; and the secure faith of Evelyn’s lover, that “God creates the love to reward the love,” is not his.  His mistress will never “awake and remember and understand.”  But that dead form he is permitted to clasp; and in the rapture of that phantom companionship passion and thought slowly transfigure and glorify his fate, till from the lone limbo of outcast lovers he seems to have penetrated to the innermost fiery core of life, which art and poetry grope after in vain—­to possess that supreme moment of earth which, prolonged, is heaven.

     “What if heaven be that, fair and strong
      At life’s best, with our eyes upturned
      Whither life’s flower is first discerned,
        We, fixed so, ever should so abide? 
      What if we still ride on, we two
      With life for ever old yet new,
      Changed not in kind but in degree,
      The instant made eternity,—­
      And heaven just prove that I and she
        Ride, ride together, for ever ride?”

The “glory of failure” is with Browning a familiar and inexhaustible theme; but its spiritual abstraction here flushes with the human glory of possession; the aethereal light and dew are mingled with breath and blood; and in the wonderful long-drawn rhythm of the verse we hear the steady stride of the horses as they bear their riders farther and farther in to the visionary land of Romance.

It is only the masculine lover whom Browning allows thus to get the better of unreturned love.  His women have no such remedia amoris; their heart’s blood will not transmute into the ichor of poetry.  It is women almost alone who ever utter the poignancy of rejected love; in them it is tragic, unreflecting, unconsolable, and merciless; while something of his own elastic buoyancy of intellect, his supple optimism, his analytic, dissipating fancy, infused itself into his portrayal of the grief-pangs of his own sex.  This distinction is very apparent in the group of lyrics which deal with the less complete divisions of love.  An almost oppressive intensity of womanhood pulses in A Woman’s Last Word, In a Year, and Any Wife to Any Husband:  the first, with its depth of self-abasement and its cloying lilting melody, trembles, exquisite as it is, on the verge of the “sentimental.”  There is a rarer, subtler pathos in Two in the Campagna.  The outward scene finds its way to his senses, and its images make a language for his mood, or else they break sharply across it and sting it to a cry.  He feels the Campagna about him, with its tranced immensity lying bare to heaven:—­