obligation,' and, if she were never to write another line, or speak another 'intelligible word,' he would love her not less but more. His 'whole life is wound up and down and over her.' And she, though she loves his poetry, agrees that it is not 'the flower of his nature.' That flower is something nameless and mystical. She used to fancy that she could see him in his poems; but then 'broken sights and forms look strange and unlike' when she 'stands by the complete idea.' She only wishes that he would reveal his personality more clearly by uttering himself directly without the dramatic apparatus which is apt to puzzle the less intelligent readers. And here one must apologise for quoting scraps of sentences which seem to lose their force and grace when detached from the context. Browning to the end has the odd tendency to put things in a quaint and tortuous fashion, which is represented by the 'put-case' of his later poems. But no love-letters since the days of Heloisa could be more glowing with a devotion which one can only regard with reverence. Both of them have, of course, a pretext for exerting their ingenuity in that old problem which is tiresome in ethical philosophers, but infinitely delightful between a pair of lovers. Is not
