This is the stuff of life that Browning loved to paint--interwoven darkness and brightness, sorrow and joy trembling each on the edge of the other, life playing at ball, as joyous as Nausicaa and her maids, on a thin crust over a gulf of death.
Just such another poem--of the sportiveness of love, only this time in memory, not in present pleasure, is to be found in _A Lovers' Quarrel_, and the quarrel is the dark element in it.

Browning always feels that mighty passion has its root in tragedy, and that it seeks relief in comedy.

The lover sits by the fireside alone, and recalls, forgetting pain for a moment, the joyful play they two had together, when love expressed its depth of pleasure in dramatic fancies.

Every separate picture is done in Browning's impressionist way.

And when the glad memories are over, and the sorrow returns, passion leaps out-- It is twelve o'clock: I shall hear her knock In the worst of a storm's uproar, I shall pull her through the door, I shall have her for evermore! This is partly a study of the memory of love; and Browning has represented, without any sorrow linked to it, memorial love in a variety of characters under different circumstances, so that, though the subject is the same, the treatment varies.