“MAGICAL NATURE.

      1.

      Flower—­I never fancied, jewel—­I profess you! 
        Bright I see and soft I feel the outside of a flower. 
      Save but glow inside and—­jewel, I should guess you,
        Dim to sight and rough to touch:  the glory is the dower.

      2.

      You, forsooth, a flower?  Nay, my love, a jewel—­
        Jewel at no mercy of a moment in your prime! 
      Time may fray the flower-face:  kind be time or cruel,
        Jewel, from each facet, flash your laugh at time!”

But the finest lyric in the volume is St. Martin’s Summer, a poem fantastically tragic, hauntingly melodious, mysterious and chilling as the ghostly visitants at late love’s pleasure-bower of whom it sings.  I do not think Browning has written many lyrical poems of more brilliant and original quality. Bifurcation, as its name denotes, is a study of divided paths in life, the paths of Love and Duty chosen severally by two lovers whose epitaphs Browning gives.  The moral problem, which is sinner, which is saint, is stated and left open.  The poem is an etching, sharp, concise and suggestive. Numpholeptos (nymph-entranced) has all the mystery, the vague charm, the lovely sadness, of a picture of Burne Jones.  Its delicately fantastic colouring, its dreamy passion, and the sad and quiet sweetness of its verse, have some affinity with St. Martin’s Summer, but are unlike anything else in Browning.  It is the utterance of a hopeless-hoping and pathetically resigned love:  the love of a merely human man for an angelically pure and unhumanly cold woman, who requires in him an unattainable union of immaculate purity and complete experience of life.

“Still you stand, still you listen, still you smile! 
Still melts your moonbeam through me, white awhile,
Softening, sweetening, till sweet and soft
Increase so round this heart of mine, that oft
I could believe your moonbeam smile has past
The pallid limit and, transformed at last,
Lies, sunlight and salvation—­warms the soul
It sweetens, softens!

* * * * *

What means the sad slow silver smile above
My clay but pity, pardon?—­at the best,
But acquiescence that I take my rest,
Contented to be clay, while in your heaven
The sun reserves love for the Spirit-Seven
Companioning God’s throne they lamp before,
—­Leaves earth a mute waste only wandered o’er
By that pale soft sweet disempassioned moon
Which smiles me slow forgiveness!  Such the boon
I beg?  Nay, dear ... 
Love, the love whole and sole without alloy!”

The action of this soul’s tragedy takes place under “the light that never was on sea or land”:  it is the tragedy of a soul, but of a disembodied soul.