Such a mood furnishes the spiritual woof of one of Browning's most consummate and one of his loveliest lyrics, _The Last Ride Together_ and _Evelyn Hope_.
"How are we to take it ?" asks Mr Fotheringham of the latter.

"As the language of passion resenting death and this life's woeful incompleteness?
or as a prevision of the soul in a moment of intensest life ?" The question may be asked; yet the passion of regret which glows and vibrates through it is too suffused with exalted faith in a final recovery to find poignant expression.

This lyric, with its taking melody, has delighted thousands to whom Browning is otherwise "obscure," partly because it appeals with naive audacity at once to Romantic and to Christian sentiment--combining the faith in love's power to seal its object for ever as its own with the Christian faith in personal immortality--a personal immortality in which there is yet marrying and giving in marriage, as Romance demands.

_The Last Ride Together_ has attracted a different audience.

Its passion is of a rarer and more difficult kind, less accessible to the love and less flattering to the faith of common minds.