Nevertheless it is her face which has "filled the empty sheath of a man" with a blade for a knight's adventure--The Duke grew straightway brave and wise.
And then follow delays of convenience, excuses, postponements, and the Duke's flood of passion dwindles to a thread, and is lost in the sandy flats of life: So weeks grew months, years; gleam by gleam The glory dropped from their youth and love, And both perceived they had dreamed a dream.
Their end was a crime, but Browning's contention is that a crime may serve for a test as well as a virtue; in that test the Duke and the lady had alike failed through mere languor of soul: And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost Is--the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin, Though the end in sight was a vice, I say.
Had Tennyson treated the same subject he would probably have glorified their action as a victorious obedience to the law of self-reverence and self-control.
The reunion and the severance of lovers are presented in three poems.
Winter, chill without but warm within, with its pastimes of passion, the energies of joy breaking forth in play, is contrasted in _A Lovers' Quarrel_ with springtime, all gladness without and a strange void and shiver at the heart of things, because alienation has taken the place of camaraderie between the lover and his mistress.

The mass and intensity of colour in the stanza which dashes in a sketch of the Pampas, with its leagues of sunflowers, and a wild horse, "black neck and eyeballs keen" appearing through them, almost afflict the reader's sense of sight.
There is a fine irony in the title of the other poem of contention, _A Womans Last Word_: In a quarrel a woman will have the last word, and here it is--the need of quietude for a little while that she may recover from the bewildering stroke of pain, and then entire oblivion of the wrong with unmeasured self-surrender.

The poem of union, _Love among the Ruins_, is constructed in a triple contrast; the endless pastures prolonged to the edge of sunset, with their infinity of calm, are contrasted with the vast and magnificent animation of the city which once occupied the plain and the mountain slopes.

The lover keeps at arm's-length from his heart and brain what yet fills them all the while; here in this placid pasture-land is one vivid point of intensest life; here where once were the grandeur and tumult of the enormous city is that which in a moment can abolish for the lover all its glories and its shames.

His eager anticipation of meeting his beloved, face to face and heart to heart, is not sung, after the manner of Burns, as a jet of unmingled joy; he delays his rapture to make its arrival more entirely rapturous; he uses his imagination to check and to enhance his passion; and the poem, though not a simple cry of the heart, is entirely true as a rendering of emotion which has taken imagination into its service.