Such is the mood which is presented in _One Way of Love_; the foiled lover has at least made his supreme effort; it has been fruitless, but he thinks with satisfaction that he has played boldly for the prize, and never can he say that it was not worth risking all on the bare chance of success: She will not give me heaven?
'Tis well! Lose who may--I still can say Those who win heaven, blest are they! So, too, in _The Last Ride together_, the lover is defeated but he is not cast down, and he remains magnanimous throughout the grief of defeat.

Who in this our life--he reflects--statesman or soldier, sculptor or poet, attains his complete ideal?
He has been granted the grace of one hour by his mistress' side, and he will carry the grateful recollection of this with him into the future as his inalienable and his best possession.

With these generous rejections and magnanimous acceptances of failure stands in contrast _A Serenade at the Villa_, where the lover's devotion is met only by obdurate insensibility or, worse, by an irritated sense of the persecution and plague of such love, and where all things seem to conspire to leave his pain mere pain, bitter and unredeemed.
In these examples, though love has been frustrated in its aim, the cause of failure did not lie in any infirmity of the lover's heart or will.
But what if the will itself be supine, what if it dallies and delays, consults the convenience of occasions, observes the indications of a shallow prudence, slackens its pace towards the goal, and meanwhile the passion languishes and grows pale from day to day, until the day of love has waned, and the passion dies in a twilight hour through mere inanition?
Such a failure as this seems to Browning to mean the perishing of a soul, or of more souls than one.

He takes in _The Statue and the Bust_ a case where the fulfilment of passion would have been a crime.

The lady is a bride of the Riccardi; to win her, now a wedded wife, would be to violate the law of God and man.