“Nobly, nobly, Cape Saint Vincent to the North-West died away;
      Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay;
      Bluish ’mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay;
      In the dimmest North-East distance dawned Gibraltar grand and gray;
      ’Here and here did England help me:  how can I help England?’—­say,
      Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise and pray,
      While Jove’s planet rises yonder, silent over Africa.”

Next to The Lost Leader comes, in the original edition, a sort of companion poem, in

      “THE LOST MISTRESS.

      I.

      All’s over, then:  does truth sound bitter
        As one at first believes? 
      Hark! ‘tis the sparrows’ good-night twitter
        About your cottage eaves!

      II.

      And the leaf-buds on the vine are woolly,
        I noticed that, to-day;
      One day more bursts them open fully
       —­You know the red turns gray.

      III.

      To-morrow we meet the same, then, dearest? 
        May I take your hand in mine? 
      Mere friends are we,—­well, friends the merest
        Keep much that I resign: 

      IV.

      For each glance of the eye so bright and black
        Though I keep with heart’s endeavour,—­
      Your voice, when you wish the snowdrops back,
        Though it stay in my heart for ever!—­

      V.

      Yet I will but say what mere friends say,
        Or only a thought stronger;
      I will hold your hand but as long as all may. 
        Or so very little longer!”

This is one of those love-songs which we cannot but consider among the noblest of such songs in all Love’s language.  The subject of “unrequited love” has probably produced more effusions of sickly sentiment than any other single subject.  But Browning, who has employed the motive so often (here, for instance, and yet more notably in The Last Ride Together) deals with it in a way that is at once novel and fundamental.  There is no talk, among his lovers, of “blighted hearts,” no whining and puling, no contemptible professions of contempt for the woman who has had the ill-taste to refuse some wondrous-conceited lover, but a noble manly resignation, a profound and still grateful sorrow which has no touch in it of reproach, no tone of disloyalty, and no pretence of despair.  In the first of the Garden Fancies (The Flower’s Name) a delicate little love-story of a happier kind is hinted at.  The second Garden Fancy (Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis) is of very different tone.  It is a whimsical tale of a no less whimsical revenge taken upon a piece of pedantic lumber, the name of which is given in the title.  The varying ring and swing communicated to the dactyls of these two pieces by the jolly humour of the one and the refined sentiment of the other, is a point worth noticing.  The easy flow, the careless charm of their versification, is by no means the artless matter it may seem to a careless reader.  Nor is it the easiest of metrical tasks to poise perfectly the loose lilt of such verses as these:—­