Yet neither here nor elsewhere did Browning care to dwell upon the finished completeness of the perfect union.

His intellectual thirst for the problematic, and his ethical thirst for the incomplete, combined to hurry him away to the moments of suspense, big with undecided or unfulfilled fate.

The lover among the ruins is awaiting his mistress; the rapturous expectancy of another waiting lover is sung in _In Three Days_.

And from the fireside the poet wanders in thought from that highest height of love which he has won to the mystic hour before he won it, when the elements out of which his fate was to be resolved still hung apart, awaiting the magical touch, which might never be given:-- "Oh moment, one and infinite! The water slips o'er stock and stone; The West is tender, hardly bright: How grey at once is the evening grown-- One star, its chrysolite! * * * * * Oh, the little more, and how much it is! And the little less, and what worlds away! How a sound shall quicken content to bliss, Or a breath suspend the blood's best play, And life be a proof of this!" But the poet who lingered over these moments of suspended fate did not usually choose the harmonious solution of them.

The "little less" of incomplete response might "suspend the breath" of the lover, but it was an inexhaustible inspiration to the poet.