It is not in this fairy fashion that the truly modern poet declares his passion; it is not thus that Wordsworth sings to us of Lucy, the most alluring and shadowy figure in English poetry,—Lucy, richly dowered with a few short verses of unapproachable beauty. To the lover of Wordsworth her death is a lasting hurt. We cannot endure to think of her as he thinks of her,—
"Rolled round in earth's diurnal course
With rocks, and stones, and trees."
We cannot endure that anything so fine and rare should slip forever from the sunshine, and that the secret stars should look down upon her maidenhood no more. Browning, too, who has been termed the poet of love, who has revealed to us every changeful mood, every stifled secret, every light and shade of human emotion,—how has he dealt with his engrossing theme? Beneath his unsparing touch, at once burning and subtle, the soul lies bare, and its passions rend it like hounds. All that is noble, generous, suffering, shameful, finds in him its ablest exponent. Those strange, fantastic sentences in which Mr. Pater has analyzed the inscrutable sorcery of
