Or so very little longer!"
This is one of those love-songs which we cannot but consider among the noblest of such songs in all Love's language. The subject of "unrequited love" has probably produced more effusions of sickly sentiment than any other single subject. But Browning, who has employed the motive so often (here, for instance, and yet more notably in The Last Ride Together) deals with it in a way that is at once novel and fundamental. There is no talk, among his lovers, of "blighted hearts," no whining and puling, no contemptible professions of contempt for the woman who has had the ill-taste to refuse some wondrous-conceited lover, but a noble manly resignation, a profound and still grateful sorrow which has no touch in it of reproach, no tone of disloyalty, and no pretence of despair. In the first of the Garden Fancies (The Flower's Name) a delicate little love-story of a happier kind is hinted at. The second Garden Fancy (Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis) is of very different tone. It is a whimsical tale of a no less whimsical revenge taken upon a piece of pedantic lumber, the name of which is given in the title. The varying ring and swing communicated to the dactyls of these two pieces by the jolly humour of the one and the refined sentiment of the other, is a point worth noticing. The easy flow, the careless charm of their versification, is by no means the artless matter it may seem to a careless reader. Nor is it the easiest of metrical tasks to poise perfectly the loose lilt of such verses as these:—
"What a name! Was it love or praise?
Speech half-asleep or song half-awake?
I must learn divish, one of these days,
Only for that slow sweet name's sake."
The two perfect little pieces on "Fame" and "Love," Earth's Immortalities, are remarkable, even in Browning's work, for their concentrated felicity, and, the second especially, for swift suggestiveness of haunting music. Not less exquisite in its fresh melody and subtle simplicity is the following Song:—
I.
"Nay but you, who do not love her,
Is she not pure gold, my mistress?