And straight was a path of gold for him,
And the need of a world of men for me.
The poem entitled Confessions is another of these memories, in which a dying man, careless of death, careless of the dull conventions of the clergyman, cares for nothing but the memory of his early passion for a girl one happy June, and dies in comfort of the sweetness of the memory, though he thinks—
How sad and bad and mad it was.
Few but Browning would have seen, and fewer still have recorded, this vital piece of truth. It represents a whole type of character—those who in a life of weary work keep their day of love, even when it has been wrong, as their one poetic, ideal possession, and cherish it for ever. The wrong of it disappears in the ideal beauty which now has gathered round it, and as it was faithful, unmixed with other love, it escapes degradation. We see, when the man images the past and its scenery out of the bottles of physic on the table, how the material world had been idealised to him all his life long by this passionate memory—
Do I view the world as a vale of tears?
Ah, reverend sir, not I.
It might be well to compare with this another treatment of the memory of love in St. Martin's Summer. A much less interesting and natural motive rules it than Confessions; and the characters, though more "in society" than the dying man, are grosser in nature; gross by their inability to love, or by loving freshly to make a new world in which the old sorrow dies or is transformed. There is no humour in the thing, though there is bitter irony. But there is humour in an earlier poem—A Serenade at the Villa, where, in the last verse, the bitterness of wrath and love together (a very different bitterness from that of St. Martin's Summer), breaks out, and is attributed to the garden gate. The night-watch and the singing is over; she must have heard him, but she gave no sign. He wonders what she thought, and then, because he was only half in love, flings away—
Oh how dark your villa was,
Windows fast and obdurate!