compared with the faintest pulsation of the artist's "love of loving,
rage of knowing, feeling, seeing the absolute truth of things," of the
lover's passion for union with another soul. When he describes effects
of music or painting, he passes instinctively over to the standpoint of
the composer or the performer; shows us Hugues and Andrea themselves at
the organ, or the easel; and instead of feeling the world turned into
"an unsubstantial faery place" by the magic of the cuckoo or the thrush,
strikes out playful theories of the professional methods of these
songsters,--the cuckoo's monopoly of the "minor third," the thrush's
wise way of repeating himself "lest you should think he never could
recapture his first fine careless rapture." Suffering enters Browning's
poetry almost never as the artless wail of the helpless stricken thing;
the intolerable pathos of _Ye Banks and Braes_, or of

"We twa hae paidl't in the burn
Frae morning sun till dine,"

belonged to a side of primitive emotion to which "artificial" poets like
Tennyson were far more sensitive than he. Suffering began to interest
him when the wail passed into the fierceness of vindictive passion, as
in _The Confessional_, or into the outward calm of a self-subjugated
spirit, as in _Any Wife to any Husband_, or _A Woman's Last Word_; or
into reflective and speculative, if bitter, retrospect, as in _The Worst
of It_ or _James Lee's Wife_. And happiness, equally,--even the lover's
happiness,--needed, to satisfy Browning, to have some leaven of
challenging disquiet; the lover must have something to fear, or
something to forgive, some hostility, or guilt, or absence, or death, to
brave. Or the rapturous union of lovers must be remembered with a pang,
when they have quarrelled; or its joy be sobered by recalling the
perilous hairbreadth chances incurred in achieving it (_By the