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.