It is in these small poems, dealing varyingly with various phases of love, that the finest, the rarest, work in the volume is to be found.  Such a poem as Imperante Augusto natus est (strong, impressive, effective as it is) cannot but challenge comparison with what is incomparable, the dramatic monologues of Men and Women, and in particular with the Epistle of Karshish.  In Beatrice Signorini we have one of the old studies in lovers’ casuistries; and it is told with gusto, but is after all scarcely more than its last line claims for it:  “The pretty incident I put in rhyme.”  In the Ponte dell’ Angela, Venice, we find one of the old grotesques, but more loosely “hitched into rhyme” (it is his own word) than the better among those poems which it most resembles.  But there is something not precisely similar to anything that had gone before in the dainty simplicity, the frank, beautiful fervour, of such lyrics as Summum Bonum, in which exquisite expression is given to the merely normal moods of ordinary affection.  In most of Browning’s love poems the emotion is complex, the situation more or less exceptional.  It is to this that they owe their singular, penetrating quality of charm.  But there is a charm of another kind, and a more generally appreciated one,

            “that commonplace
      Perfection of honest grace,”

which lies in the expression of feelings common to everyone, feelings which everyone can without difficulty make or imagine his own.  In the lyrics to which I am referring, Browning has spoken straight out, in just this simple, direct way, and with a delicate grace and smoothness of rhythm not always to be met with in his later work.  Here is a poem called Speculative: 

“Others may need new life in Heaven—­
Man, Nature, Art—­made new, assume! 
Man with new mind old sense to leaven,
Nature—­new light to clear old gloom,
Art that breaks bounds, gets soaring-room.

      I shall pray:  ’Fugitive as precious—­
        Minutes which passed—­return, remain! 
      Let earth’s old life once more enmesh us,
        You with old pleasure, me—­old pain,
      So we but meet nor part again.’”

How hauntingly does that give voice to the instinctive, the universal feeling! the lover’s intensity of desire for the loved and lost one, for herself, the “little human woman full of sin,” for herself, unchanged, unglorified, as she was on earth, not as she may be in a vague heaven.  To the lover in Summum Bonum all the delight of life has been granted; it lies in “the kiss of one girl,” and that has been his.  In the delicious little poem called Humility, the lover is content in being “proudly less,” a thankful pensioner on the crumbs of love’s feast, laid for another.  In White Witchcraft love has outlived injury; in the first of the Bad Dreams it has survived even heart-break.