So in "A Serenade at the Villa;"so in "One Way of Love," with its—
This hour my utmost art I prove
And speak my passion.—Heaven or Hell?
She will not give me Heaven? 'Tis well!
Lose who may—I still can say,
Those who win Heaven, blest are they!"
So in "The Last Ride Together," with its—
Since now at length my fate I know,
Since nothing all my love avails,
Since all my life seemed meant for fails,
Since this was written and needs must be—
My whole heart rises up to bless
Your name in pride and thankfulness!
Take back the hope you gave,—I claim
Only a memory of the same."
With a masculine soul for passion, a masculine intellect for thought, and a masculine genius for imagination, all on a vast scale, and all fused together in one intense fire when the theme is great and imperious, we have the highest results of which poetry is capable; and such results I recognise in the noblest poems and passages of Browning as authentic and impressive as in the noblest in our literature; supreme by magnificence of scope in his supreme work, "The Ring and the Book," but stamped with the same sterling mint-mark in many of the shorter pieces in addition to those already cited, and expressed in his own person in that surpassing "One Word More," to E. B. B. alive. which summed up the "Men and
