The lady of _The Flower's Name_ is beautiful, but her beauty is only shyly hinted; we see no feature of face or form; only the fold of her dress brushing against the box border, the "twinkling" of her white fingers among the dark leaves.

The typical lover of these lyrics is of a temperament in which feminine sensitiveness and masculine tenacity are characteristically blended; a temperament which the faintest and most fugitive signs of love--a word, a glance, the impalpable music of a romantic name--not only kindle and subdue, but permanently fortify and secure.

_Cristina_, _Rudel_, and the _Lost Mistress_ stand in a line of development which culminates in _The Last Ride Together_.

Cristina's lover has but "changed eyes" with her; but no queenly scorn of hers can undo the spiritual transformation which her glance has wrought: "Her soul's mine; and thus, grown perfect, I shall pass my life's remainder." The _Lost Mistress_ is an exquisitely tender and pathetic farewell, but not the stifled cry of a man who has received a crushing blow.

Not easily, but yet without any ruinous convulsion, he makes that transition from love to "mere friendship" which passionate men so hardly endure.
The really tragic love-story was, for Browning, the story not of love rejected but of love flagging, fading, or crushed out.
"Never fear, but there's provision Of the devil's to quench knowledge Lest on earth we walk in rapture," Cristina's lover had bitterly reflected.