as Paul Verlaine says, somewhat exclusively, in his poetical confession of faith.  It is, indeed, la Nuance, the last fine shade, that Browning has captured and fixed for us in those lovely love-poems, Summum Bonum, Poetics, a Pearl, a Girl, and the others, so young-hearted, so joyous and buoyant; and in the woody piping of Flute Music, with an Accompaniment.  Simple and eager in Dubiety, daintily, prettily pathetic in Humility, more intense in Speculative, in the fourteen lines called Now, the passion of the situation leaps like a cry from the heart, and one may say that the poem is, rather than renders, the very fever of the supreme moment, “the moment eternal.”

“Now.

      Out of your whole life give but a moment: 
      All of your life that has gone before,
      All to come after it,—­so you ignore,
      So you make perfect the present,—­condense,
      In a rapture of rage, for perfection’s endowment,
      Thought and feeling and soul and sense—­
      Merged in a moment which gives me at last
      You around me for once, you beneath me, above me—­
      Me—­sure that despite of time future, time past,—­
      This tick of our life-time’s one moment you love me! 
      How long such suspension may linger?  Ah, Sweet—­
      The moment eternal—­just that and no more—­
      When ecstasy’s utmost we clutch at the core,
      While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut and lips meet!”

Here the whole situation is merged in the single cry, the joy, “unbodied” and “embodied,” of any, of every lover; in several of the poems a more developed story is told or indicated.  One of the finest pieces in the volume is the brief dramatic monologue called Inapprehensiveness, which condenses a whole tragedy into its thirty-two lines, in the succinct, suggestive manner of such poems as My Last Duchess.  Only Heine, Browning, and George Meredith in Modern Love, each in his entirely individual way, have succeeded in dealing, in a tone of what I may call sympathetic irony, with the unheroic complications of modern life; so full of poetic matter really, but of matter so difficult to handle.  The poem is a mere incident, such as happens every day:  we are permitted to overhear a scrap of trivial conversation; but this very triviality does but deepen the effect of what we surmise, a dark obstruction, underneath the “babbling runnel” of light talk.  A study not entirely dissimilar, though, as its name warns us, more difficult to grasp, is the fourth of the Bad Dreams:  how fine, how impressive, in its dream-distorted picture of a man’s remorse for the love he has despised or neglected till death, coming in, makes love and repentance alike too late!  With these may be named that other electric little poem, Which? a study in love’s casuistries, reminding one slightly of the finest of all Browning’s studies in that kind, Adam, Lilith, and Eve.