Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/134

 poet is to express love and to teach how to love. Browning's love poems are equally remarkable for their range and for their intensity. Nowhere in English literature does this passion of love burn higher or burn purer. The passion that pulsates through In a Balcony or In a Gondola is as intense as anything in Heine, and yet it is purged of all fleshly dross. Not by any sacrifice of body to spirit, nor by any lapse into sickly sentimentalism, does Browning reach this result. The claims of the whole being, body and spirit, are admitted to the utmost, and as a consequence those of the former die away in the serener glow of the spiritual passion. As Browning regarding the struggle of life the contest of soul with soul or against all souls is eminently a man, so in his depicting of love the union of soul with soul he is preeminently the gentleman. Refinement is of the very soul of him, and that without, as so often happens, any loss of virile strength. Here more than anywhere we trace the influence of his marriage, that ideal union of two equally gifted souls which is unique in the world's history. How abiding was this influence was shown but a few months before his death in the Fitzgerald incident. It was clear enough to the dispassionate observer that Fitzgerald was speaking of Mrs. Browning