ride together" might pass into an eternal "riding on"--

"With life for ever old, yet new,
Changed not in kind but in degree,
The instant made Eternity,--
And Heaven just prove that I and she
Ride, ride together, for ever ride!"


VI.


No intellectual formula, no phrase, no word, can express the whole
purport of those intense and intimate fusions of sensation, passion, and
thought which we call poetic intuition, and which all strictly poetic
"philosophy" or "criticism of life" is an attempt to interpret and
articulate. Browning was master of more potent weapons of the strictly
intellectual kind than many poets of his rank, and his work is charged
with convictions which bear upon philosophic problems and involve
philosophic ideas. But they were neither systematic deductions from a
speculative first principle nor fragments of tradition eclectically
pieced together; by their very ambiguity and Protean many-sidedness they
betrayed that, however tinged they might be on the surface with
speculative or traditional phrases, the nourishing roots sprang from the
heart of joyous vitality in a primitive and original temperament. In
Browning, if in any man, Joy sang that "strong music of the soul" which
re-creates all the vitalities of the world, and endows us with "a new
Earth and a new Heaven." And if joy was the root of Browning's
intuition, and life "in widest commonalty spread" the element in which
it moved, Love, the most intimate, intense, and marvellous of all vital