As the heat of the summer’s beginning

Is past in the winter of love:

O purity, painful and pleading!

O coldness, ineffably gray!

O hear us, our hand-maid unheeding,

And take it away!

Browning, who treated it allegorically.

Tut! bah! We take as another case—

Pass the bills on the pills on the window-sill; notice the capsule.

(A sick man’s fancy, no doubt, but I place