"Car nous voulons la Nuance encor,
Pas la Couleur, rien que la Nuance,"
as Paul Verlaine says, somewhat exclusively, in his poetical confession of faith. It is, indeed, la Nuance, the last fine shade, that Browning has captured and fixed for us in those lovely love-poems, Summum Bonum, Poetics, a Pearl, a Girl, and the others, so young-hearted, so joyous and buoyant; and in the woody piping of Flute Music, with an Accompaniment. Simple and eager in Dubiety, daintily, prettily pathetic in Humility, more intense in Speculative, in the fourteen lines called Now, the passion of the situation leaps like a cry from the heart, and one may say that the poem is, rather than renders, the very fever of the supreme moment, "the moment eternal."
"Now.
Out of your whole life give but a moment:
All of your life that has gone before,
All to come after it,—so you ignore,
So you make perfect the present,—condense,
In a rapture of rage, for perfection's endowment,
Thought and feeling and soul and sense—