The instant made eternity,--
And heaven just prove that I and she
Ride, ride together, for ever ride?"

The "glory of failure" is with Browning a familiar and inexhaustible
theme; but its spiritual abstraction here flushes with the human glory
of possession; the æthereal light and dew are mingled with breath and
blood; and in the wonderful long-drawn rhythm of the verse we hear the
steady stride of the horses as they bear their riders farther and
farther in to the visionary land of Romance.

It is only the masculine lover whom Browning allows thus to get the
better of unreturned love. His women have no such _remedia amoris_;
their heart's blood will not transmute into the ichor of poetry. It is
women almost alone who ever utter the poignancy of rejected love; in
them it is tragic, unreflecting, unconsolable, and merciless; while
something of his own elastic buoyancy of intellect, his supple optimism,
his analytic, dissipating fancy, infused itself into his portrayal of
the grief-pangs of his own sex. This distinction is very apparent in the
group of lyrics which deal with the less complete divisions of love. An
almost oppressive intensity of womanhood pulses in _A Woman's Last Word,
In a Year_, and _Any Wife to Any Husband_: the first, with its depth of
self-abasement and its cloying lilting melody, trembles, exquisite as it
is, on the verge of the "sentimental." There is a rarer, subtler pathos
in _Two in the Campagna_. The outward scene finds its way to his senses,
and its images make a language for his mood, or else they break sharply
across it and sting it to a cry. He feels the Campagna about him, with
its tranced immensity lying bare to heaven:--

"Silence and passion, joy and peace,