Yet _Now_ and _Summum Bonum_, and _A Pearl, a Girl_, with all their apparent freshness and spontaneity, are less like rapt utterances of passion than eloquent analyses of it by one who has known it and who still vibrates with the memory.

What preoccupies and absorbs him is not the woman, but the wonder of the transfiguration wrought for him by her word or kiss,--the moment made eternal, the "blaze" in which he became "lord of heaven and earth." But some of the greatest love-poetry of the world--from Dante onwards--has reflected an intellect similarly absorbed in articulating a marvellous experience.

For the rest, _Asolando_ is a miscellany of old and new,--bright loose drift from the chance moods of genius, or bits of anecdotic lumber carefully recovered and refurbished, as in prescience of the nearing end.
Yet no such prescience appears to have been his.

His buoyant confidence in his own vitality held its own.

He was full of schemes of work.