“The silver speech,
      Of Sidney’s self, the starry paladin.”

No lover in English poetry has been so much a man as Sidney and Browning.

Two in the Campagna presents a more intricate situation than most of the love-poems.  It is the lament of a man, addressed to the woman at his side, whom he loves and by whom he is loved, over the imperfection and innocent inconstancy of his love.  The two can never quite grow to one, and he, oppressed by the terrible burden of imperfect sympathies, is for ever seeking, realising, losing, then again seeking the spiritual union still for ever denied.  The vague sense of the Roman Campagna is distilled into exquisite words, and through all there sounds the sad and weary undertone of baffled endeavour:—­

           “Infinite passion, and the pain
      Of finite hearts that yearn.”

The Last Ride Together is one of those love-poems which I have spoken of as specially noble and unique, and it is, I think, the noblest and most truly unique of them all.  Thought, emotion and melody are mingled in perfect measure:  it has the lyrical “cry,” and the objectiveness of the drama.  The situation, sufficiently indicated in the title, is selected with a choice and happy instinct:  the very motion of riding is given in the rhythm.  Every line throbs with passion, or with a fervid meditation which is almost passion, and in the last verse, and, still more, in the single line—­

      “Who knows but the world may end to-night?”

the dramatic intensity strikes as with an electric shock.

By the Fireside though in all its circumstances purely dramatic and imaginary, rises again and again to the fervour of personal feeling, and we can hardly be wrong in classing it, in soul though not in circumstance, with One Word More and the other sacred poems which enshrine the memory of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.  But, apart from this suggestion, the poem is a masterpiece of subtle simplicity and picturesqueness.  Nothing could be more admirable in themselves than the natural descriptions throughout; but these are never mere isolated descriptions, nor even a mere stationary background:  they are fused with the emotion which they both help to form and assist in revealing.

One Word More (To E. B. B.) is one of those sacred poems in which, once and again, a great poet has embalmed in immortal words the holiest and deepest emotion of his existence.  Here, and here only in the songs consecrated by the husband to the wife, the living love that too soon became a memory is still “a hope, to sing by gladly.” One Word More is Browning’s answer to the Sonnets from the Portuguese.  And, just as Mrs. Browning never wrote anything more perfect than the Sonnets, so Browning has never written anything more perfect than the answering lyric.

Yet another section of this most richly varied volume consists of poems, narrative and lyrical, dealing in a brief and pregnant way with some special episode or emotion:  love, in some instances, but in a less exclusive way than in the love-poems proper. The Statue and the Bust (one of Browning’s best narratives) is a romantic and mainly true tale, written in terza rima, but in short lines.  The story on which it is founded is a Florentine tradition.