His plans, as he told Miss Barrett, had been made without any thought of "finding such a one as you." That discovery introduced a new and unknown factor into his scheme of things.

The love-poetry of the Dramatic Lyrics and Romances is still somewhat tentative and insecure.

The beautiful fantasia _In a Gondola_ was directly inspired by a picture of his friend Maclise.

He paints the romance of the lover's twilight tryst with all his incisive vigour; but his own pulse beats rather with the lover who goes forth at daybreak, and feels the kindling summons of the morning glory of sea and sunlight into the "world of men." His attitude to women is touched with the virginal reserve of the young Hippolytus, whose tragic fate he had told in the lofty _Prologue_ of Artemis.

He approaches them with a kind of delicate and distant awe; tender, even chivalrous, but accentuating rather the reserves and reticences of chivalry than its rewards.