It may even be questioned whether all Browning's poetry of love's tragedy will live as long as a few stanzas of Musset's _Nuits_,--bare, unadorned verses, devoid of fancy or wit, but intense and penetrating as a cry:-- "Ce soir encor je t'ai vu m'apparaitre, C'etait par une triste nuit.
L'aile des vents battait a ma fenetre; J'etais seul, courbe sur mon lit.
J'y regardais une place cherie, Tiede encor d'un baiser brulant; Et je songeais comme la femme oublie, Et je sentais un lambeau de ma vie, Qui se dechirait lentement.
Je rassemblais des lettres de la veille, Des cheveux, des debris d'amour.
Tout ce passe me criait a l'oreille Ses eternels serments d'un jour.
Je contemplais ces reliques sacrees, Qui me faisaient trembler la main: Larmes du coeur par le coeur devorees, Et que les yeux qui les avaient pleurees Ne reconnaitront plus demain!"[37] [Footnote 37: Musset, _Nuit de decembre_.] The same quest of the problematic which attracted Browning to the poetry of passion repelled or unrequited made him a curious student also of fainter and feebler "wars of love"-- embryonic or simulated forms of passion which stood still farther from his personal experience.

_A Light Woman, A Pretty Woman_, and _Another Way of Love_ are refined studies in this world of half tones.

But the most important and individual poem of this group is _The Statue and the Bust_, an excellent example of the union in Browning of the Romantic temper with a peculiar mastery of everything in human nature which traverses and repudiates Romance.

The duke and the lady are simpler and slighter Hamlets--Hamlets who have no agonies of self-questioning and self-reproach; intervening in the long pageant of the famous lovers of romantic tradition with the same disturbing shock as he in the bead-roll of heroic avengers.

The poet's indignant denunciation of his lovers at the close, apparently for not violating the vows of marriage, is puzzling to readers who do not appreciate the extreme subtlety of Browning's use of figure.