The "glory of failure" is with Browning a familiar and inexhaustible theme; but its spiritual abstraction here flushes with the human glory of possession; the æthereal light and dew are mingled with breath and blood; and in the wonderful long-drawn rhythm of the verse we hear the steady stride of the horses as they bear their riders farther and farther in to the visionary land of Romance.
It is only the masculine lover whom Browning allows thus to get the better of unreturned love. His women have no such _remedia amoris_; their heart's blood will not transmute into the ichor of poetry. It is women almost alone who ever utter the poignancy of rejected love; in them it is tragic, unreflecting, unconsolable, and merciless; while something of his own elastic buoyancy of intellect, his supple optimism, his analytic, dissipating fancy, infused itself into his portrayal of the grief-pangs of his own sex. This distinction is very apparent in the group of lyrics which deal with the less complete divisions of love. An almost oppressive intensity of womanhood pulses in _A Woman's Last Word, In a Year_, and _Any Wife to Any Husband_: the first, with its depth of self-abasement and its cloying lilting melody, trembles, exquisite as it is, on the verge of the "sentimental." There is a rarer, subtler pathos in _Two in the Campagna_. The outward scene finds its way to his senses, and its images make a language for his mood, or else they break sharply across it and sting it to a cry. He feels the Campagna about him, with its tranced immensity lying bare to heaven:--
"Silence and passion, joy and peace, An everlasting wash of air-- ... Such life here, through such length of hours, Such miracles performed in play, Such primal naked forms of flowers, Such letting nature have her way While heaven looks from its towers;"
and in the presence of that large sincerity of nature he would fain also "be unashamed of soul" and probe love's wound to the core. But the invisible barriers will not be put aside or transcended, and in the midst of that "infinite passion" there remain "the finite hearts that yearn." Or else he wakes after the quarrel in the blitheness of a bright dawn:--
"All is blue again After last night's rain, And the South dries the hawthorn spray. Only, my love's away! I'd as lief that the blue were grey."