I know of no piece of verse in the language which has more of the quality and hush of awe in it than this little fragment of eighteen lines.
Instans Tyrannus[[34]] (the Threatening Tyrant) recalls by its motive, however unlike it may be as a poem, the Soliloquy of the divish Cloister. The situations are widely different, but the root of each is identical. In both is developed the mood of passive or active hate, arising from mere instinctive dislike. But while in the earlier poem the theme is treated with boisterous sardonic humour, it is here embodied in the grave figure of a stern, single-minded, relentless hater, a tyrant in both senses of the term. Another poem, representing an act of will, though here it is love, not hate, that impels, is Mesmerism. The intense absorption, the breathless eagerness of the mesmerist, are rendered in a really marvellous way by the breathless and yet measured race of the verses: fifteen stanzas succeed one another without a single full-stop, or a real pause in sense or sound. The beautiful and significant little poem called The Patriot: an old Story, is a narrative and parable at once, and only too credible and convincing as each. Respectability holds in its three stanzas all that is vital and enviable in the real "Bohemia," and is the first of several poems of escape, which culminate in Fifine at the Fair. Both here and in another short suggestive poem, A Light Woman (which might be called the fourth act of a tragedy), the situation is outlined like a silhouette. Equally graphic, in the more ordinary sense of the term, is the picturesque and whimsical view of town and country life taken by a frivolous Italian person of quality in the poem named Up at a Villa—Down in the City, "a masterpiece of irony and of description," as an Italian critic has defined it.
Of the wealth of lyrics and short poems no adequate count can here be made. Yet, I cannot pass without a word, if only in a word may I indicate, the admirable craftsmanship and playful dexterity of the lines on A Pretty Woman; the pathetic feeling and the exquisite and novel music of Love in a Life and Life in a Love; the tense emotion, the suppressed and hopeful passion, of In Three Days, and the sad and haunting song of In a Year, with its winding and liquid melody, its mournful and wondering lament over love forgotten; the rich and marvellously modulated music, the glowing colour, the vivid and passionate fancy, of Women and Roses; the fresh felicity of "De Gustibus," with its enthusiasm for Italy scarcely less fervid than the English enthusiasm of the Home-Thoughts; the quaint humour and pregnant simplicity of the admirable little parable of The Twins; the sympathetic charm and light touch of Misconceptions, and the pretty figurative fancy of My Star; the strong, sad, suggestive little poem named One Way of Love, with its delicately-wrought companion Another Way of Love, the former a love-lyric to be classed with The Lost Mistress and The Last Ride Together; and, finally, the epilogue to the first volume and a late poem in the second: Memorabilia, a tribute to Shelley, full of grateful remembrance and admiring love, significant among the few personal utterances of the poet, and the not less lovely poem and only less fervent tribute to Keats, the sumptuous, gorgeous, and sardonic lines on Popularity. A careful study or even, one would think, a careless perusal, of but a few of the poems named above, should be enough to show, once and for all, the infinite richness and variety of Browning's melody, and his complete mastery over the most simple and the most intricate lyric measures. As an example of the finest artistic simplicity, rich with restrained pathos and quiet with keen tension of feeling, we may choose the following.
"ONE WAY OF LOVE
I.
All June I bound the rose in sheaves.
Now, rose by rose, I strip the leaves
And strew them where Pauline may pass.
She will not turn aside? Alas!
Let them lie. Suppose they die?