incompleteness? or as a prevision of the soul in a moment of intensest
life?" The question may be asked; yet the passion of regret which glows
and vibrates through it is too suffused with exalted faith in a final
recovery to find poignant expression. This lyric, with its taking
melody, has delighted thousands to whom Browning is otherwise "obscure,"
partly because it appeals with naïve audacity at once to Romantic and to
Christian sentiment--combining the faith in love's power to seal its
object for ever as its own with the Christian faith in personal
immortality--a personal immortality in which there is yet marrying and
giving in marriage, as Romance demands. _The Last Ride Together_ has
attracted a different audience. Its passion is of a rarer and more
difficult kind, less accessible to the love and less flattering to the
faith of common minds. This lover dreams of no future recovery of more
than he still retains; his love, once for all, avails nothing; and the
secure faith of Evelyn's lover, that "God creates the love to reward the
love," is not his. His mistress will never "awake and remember and
understand." But that dead form he is permitted to clasp; and in the
rapture of that phantom companionship passion and thought slowly
transfigure and glorify his fate, till from the lone limbo of outcast
lovers he seems to have penetrated to the innermost fiery core of life,
which art and poetry grope after in vain--to possess that supreme moment
of earth which, prolonged, is heaven.

"What if heaven be that, fair and strong
At life's best, with our eyes upturned
Whither life's flower is first discerned,
We, fixed so, ever should so abide?
What if we still ride on, we two
With life for ever old yet new,
Changed not in kind but in degree,