When we have formed these into a group we perceive that the group falls in the main into two divisions--poems which tell of attainment, and poems which tell of failure or defeat.

Certain persons whose centre is a little hard kernel of egoism may be wholly disqualified for the test created by a generous passion.

Browning does not belabour with heavy invective the _Pretty Woman_ of his poem, who is born without a heart; she is a flower-like creature and of her kind is perfect; only the flower is to be gazed at, not gathered; or, if it must be gathered, then at last to be thrown away.

The chief distinction between the love of man and the love of woman, implied in various poems, is this--the man at his most blissful moment cries "What treasures I have obtained!" the woman cries "What treasures have I to surrender and bestow ?" Hence the singleness and finality in the election of passion made by a woman as compared with a man's acquisitiveness of delight.

The unequal exchange of a transitory for an enduring surrender of self is the sorrow which pulsates through the lines of _In a Year_, as swift and broken with pauses as the beating of a heart: Dear, the pang is brief, Do thy part, Have thy pleasure! How perplexed Grows belief! Well, this cold clay clod Was man's heart: Crumble it and what comes next?
Is it God?
And with no chilling of love on the man's part, this is the point of central pain, in that poem of exquisite and pathetic distrust at the heart of trust and admiration, _Any Wife to any Husband_; noble and faithful as the husband has been, still he is only a man.