“Silence and passion, joy and peace,
        An everlasting wash of air—­ ... 
      Such life here, through such length of hours,
        Such miracles performed in play,
      Such primal naked forms of flowers,
        Such letting nature have her way
      While heaven looks from its towers;”

and in the presence of that large sincerity of nature he would fain also “be unashamed of soul” and probe love’s wound to the core.  But the invisible barriers will not be put aside or transcended, and in the midst of that “infinite passion” there remain “the finite hearts that yearn.”  Or else he wakes after the quarrel in the blitheness of a bright dawn:—­

          “All is blue again
          After last night’s rain,
      And the South dries the hawthorn spray. 
          Only, my love’s away! 
      I’d as lief that the blue were grey.”

The disasters of love rarely, with Browning, stir us very deeply.  His temperament was too elastic, his intellect too resourceful, to enter save by artificial processes into the mood of blank and hopeless grief.  Tragedy did not lie in his blood, and fortune—­kinder to the man than to the poet—­had as yet denied him, in love, the “baptism of sorrow” which has wrung immortal verse from the lips of frailer men.  It may even be questioned whether all Browning’s poetry of love’s tragedy will live as long as a few stanzas of Musset’s Nuits,—­bare, unadorned verses, devoid of fancy or wit, but intense and penetrating as a cry:—­

     “Ce soir encor je t’ai vu m’apparaitre,
        C’etait par une triste nuit. 
      L’aile des vents battait a ma fenetre;
        J’etais seul, courbe sur mon lit. 
      J’y regardais une place cherie,
        Tiede encor d’un baiser brulant;
      Et je songeais comme la femme oublie,
      Et je sentais un lambeau de ma vie,
        Qui se dechirait lentement. 
      Je rassemblais des lettres de la veille,
        Des cheveux, des debris d’amour. 
      Tout ce passe me criait a l’oreille
        Ses eternels serments d’un jour. 
      Je contemplais ces reliques sacrees,
        Qui me faisaient trembler la main: 
      Larmes du coeur par le coeur devorees,
      Et que les yeux qui les avaient pleurees
        Ne reconnaitront plus demain!"[37]

[Footnote 37:  Musset, Nuit de decembre.]

The same quest of the problematic which attracted Browning to the poetry of passion repelled or unrequited made him a curious student also of fainter and feebler “wars of love”—­embryonic or simulated forms of passion which stood still farther from his personal experience. A Light Woman, A Pretty Woman, and Another Way of Love are refined studies in this world of half tones.  But the most important and individual poem of this group is The Statue and the Bust, an excellent example of the union in Browning of the Romantic temper