Flower—I never fancied, jewel—I profess you!
Bright I see and soft I feel the outside of a flower.
Save but glow inside and—jewel, I should guess you,
Dim to sight and rough to touch: the glory is the dower.
You, forsooth, a flower? Nay, my love, a jewel—
Jewel at no mercy of a moment in your prime!
Time may fray the flower-face: kind be time or cruel,
Jewel, from each facet, flash your laugh at time!"
But the finest lyric in the volume is St. Martin's Summer, a poem fantastically tragic, hauntingly melodious, mysterious and chilling as the ghostly visitants at late love's pleasure-bower of whom it sings. I do not think Browning has written many lyrical poems of more brilliant and original quality. Bifurcation, as its name denotes, is a study of divided paths in life, the paths of Love and Duty chosen severally by two lovers whose epitaphs Browning gives. The moral problem, which is sinner, which is saint, is stated and left open. The poem is an etching, sharp, concise and suggestive. Numpholeptos (nymph-entranced) has all the mystery, the vague charm, the lovely sadness, of a picture of Burne Jones. Its delicately fantastic colouring, its dreamy passion, and the sad and quiet sweetness of its verse, have some affinity with St. Martin's Summer, but are unlike anything else in Browning. It is the utterance of a hopeless-hoping and pathetically resigned love: the love of a merely human man for an angelically pure and unhumanly cold woman, who requires in him an unattainable union of immaculate purity and complete experience of life.