In _Appearances_ the "poor room" in which troth was plighted and the "rich room" in which "the other word was spoken" become half human in sympathy.

A woman's "natural magic" makes the bare walls she dwells in a "fairy tale" of verdure and song.
The prologue seems deliberately to strike this note, with its exquisite idealisation of the old red brick wall and its creepers lush and lithe,--a formidable barrier indeed, but one which spirit and love can pass.

For here the "wall" is the unsympathetic throng who close the poet in; there "I--prison-bird, with a ruddy strife At breast, and a life whence storm-notes start-- Hold on, hope hard in the subtle thing That's spirit: though cloistered fast, soar free; Account as wood, brick, stone, this ring Of the rueful neighbours, and--forth to thee!" These stanzas finely hint at a second theme which wanders in and out among the strident notes of Browning's anti-critical "apologetics." Of all the springs of poetry none lay deeper in Browning than love; to the last he could sing of love with the full inspiration of his best time; and the finest things in this volume are concerned with it.

But as compared with the love-lays of the _Dramatic Lyrics_ or _Men and Women_ there is something wistful, far off, even elegiac, in this love-poetry.
A barrier, undefinable but impassable, seems to part us from the full tide of youthful passion.

The richest in this tender sunset beauty is the _St Martin's Summer_, where the late love is suddenly smitten with the discovery that its apparent warmth is a ghost of old passion buried but unallayed.