Browning's personal experience is here taken up into his imagination and transfigured, but its substance remains what it had been in literal fact.
The poems of failure are more numerous, and they range through various degrees and kinds of failure.

It is not death which can bring the sense of failure to love.

In _Evelyn Hope_ all the passion has been on the man's side; all possibilities of love in the virginal heart of the dead girl, all her warmth and sweetness, had been folded in the bud.

But death, in the mood of infinite tenderness and unfulfilled aspiration which the poem expresses, seems no bar to some far-off attainment, of which the speaker's passion, breaking through time, is the assurance, an attainment the nature of which he cannot divine but which will surely explain the meaning of things that are now obscure.

Perhaps the saddest and the most hopeless kind of failure is that in which, to borrow an image from the old allegory, the arrow of love all but flies to the mark and yet just misses it.