Were it not for its unique position in Browning’s poetry, one might well be content with a passing tribute to the great love canticle which closes Men and Women—­the crown, as it is in a pregnant sense the nucleus, of the whole.  But here, for “once, and only once, and for one only,” not only the dramatic instinct, which habitually coloured all his speech, but the reticence which so hardly permitted it to disclose his most intimate personal emotion, were deliberately overcome—­overcome, however, only in order, as it were, to explain and justify their more habitual sway.  All the poetry in it is reached through the endeavour to find speaking symbols for a love that cannot be told.  The poet is a high priest, entering with awed steps the sanctuary which even he cannot tread without desecration save after divesting himself of all that is habitual and of routine,—­even the habits of his genius and the routine of his art.  Unable to divest himself of his poetry altogether, for he has no other art, he lays aside his habitual dramatic guise to speak, for once, not as Lippo, Roland, or Andrea, but “in his true person.”  And he strips off the veil of his art and speaks in his own person only to declare that speech is needless, and to fall upon that exquisite symbol of an esoteric love uncommunicated and incommunicable to the apprehension of the world,—­the moon’s other face with all its “silent silver lights and darks,” undreamed of by any mortal.  “Heaven’s gift takes man’s abatement,” and poetry itself may only hint at the divinity of perfect love.  The One Word More was written in September 1855, shortly before the publication of the volume it closed, as the old moon waned over the London roofs.  Less than six years later the “moon of poets” had passed for ever from his ken.

CHAPTER V.

LONDON. DRAMATIS PERSONAE.

      Ah, Love! but a day
        And the world has changed! 
      The sun’s away,
        And the bird estranged.
      —­James Lee’s Wife.

That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, Or decomposes but to recompose, Become my universe that feels and knows. —­Epilogue.

The catastrophe of June 29, 1861, closed with appalling suddenness the fifteen years’ married life of Browning.  “I shall grow still, I hope,” he wrote to Miss Haworth, a month later, “but my root is taken, and remains.”  The words vividly express the valour in the midst of desolation which animated one little tried hitherto by sorrow.  The Italian home was shattered, and no thought of even attempting a patched-up existence in its ruined walls seems to have occurred to him; even the neighbourhood of the spot in which all that was mortal of her had been laid had no power to detain him.  But his departure was no mere flight from scenes intolerably dear.  He had their child to educate and his own life to fulfil, and he set himself with grim resolution