“Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns! 
        Earth’s returns
      For whole centuries of folly, noise, and sin! 
        Shut them in,
      With their triumphs and their glories and the rest! 
        Love is best.”

Another lover, in My Star, pours lyric disdain upon his friends for whose purblind common-sense vision the star which to him “dartled red and blue,” now a bird, now a flower, was just—­a star.  More finely touched than either of these is By the Fireside.  After One Word More, to which it is obviously akin, it is Browning’s most perfect rendering of the luminous inner world, all-sufficing and self-contained, of a rapturous love.  The outer world is here neither thrust aside nor fantastically varied; it is drawn into the inner world by taking its hue and becoming the confidant and executant of its will.  A landscape so instinct with the hushed awe of expectation and with a mystic tenderness is hardly to be found elsewhere save in Christabel,—­

     “We two stood there with never a third,
        But each by each, as each knew well: 
      The sights we saw and the sounds we heard,
        The lights and the shades made up a spell,
      Till the trouble grew and stirred.

* * * * *

      A moment after, and hands unseen
        Were hanging the night around us fast;
      But we knew that a bar was broken between
        Life and life:  we were mixed at last
      In spite of the mortal screen.

      The forests had done it; there they stood;
        We caught for a moment the powers at play: 
      They had mingled us so, for once and good,
        Their work was done—­we might go or stay,
      They relapsed to their ancient mood.”

By the Fireside is otherwise memorable as portraying with whatever disguise the Italian home-life of the poet and his wife.  The famous description of “the perfect wife” as she sat

     “Musing by firelight, that great brow
        And the spirit-small hand propping it,
      Yonder, my heart knows how”—­

remain among the most living portraitures of that exquisite but fragile form.  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:—­