I accept this delightful poem with some reserve, for I think the lovers had not so wholly emancipated themselves from "the world" as they were pleased to think. The world still counted for them--as it counts for all who remember so vehemently to denounce it. Moreover, married, they could, were their courage complete, have beaten the world by forgetting it. No more docile wild-beast than that much badgered creature when once it recognises the true Contemner! To "Feel the Boulevard break again To warmth and light and bliss" --on wild wet nights of wandering . . . this might even, through the example of the Real Unfearing, become a craze! Yes--we must refuse to be dazzled by rhetoric. These lovers also had their falling-short--they could not _forget_ the world. Hitherto we have considered the normal meetings of lovers. Now we turn to the dream-meetings--the great encounters which all of us feel might be, yet are not. There can be few to whom there has not come that imagination of the spiritually compelled presence, which Browning has so marvellously uttered in _Mesmerism_. Here, in these breathless stanzas,[208:1] so almost literally mesmeric that, as we read them (or rather draw them in at our own breathless lips!), we believe in the actual coming of our loved one, and scarce dare look round lest we should find the terrifying glory true . . . here the man sits alone in his room at dead of night, and wills the woman to be with him. He brings his thought to bear on her, "till he feels his hair turn grey": "Till I seemed to have and hold In the vacancy 'Twixt the walls and me From the hair-plait's chestnut-gold To the foot in its muslin fold-- Have and hold, then and there, Her, from head to foot, Breathing and mute, Passive and yet aware, In the grasp of my steady stare-- Hold and have, there and then, All her body and soul That completes my whole, All that women add to men, In the clutch of my steady ken"-- . . . if so he can sit, never loosing his will, and with a gesture of his hands that "breaks into very flame," he feels that he _must_ draw her from "the house called hers, not mine," which soon will seem to suffocate her if she cannot escape from it: "Out of doors into the night! On to the maze Of the wild wood-ways, Not turning to left nor right From the pathway, blind with sight-- Swifter and still more swift, As the crowding peace Doth to joy increase In the wild blind eyes uplift Thro' the darkness and the drift!"