“How many times do I love thee, dear? Tell me how many thoughts there be In the atmosphere Of a new-fall’n year, Whose white and sable hours appear The latest flake of Eternity: So many times do I love thee, dear. “How many times do I love again? Tell me how many beads there are In a silver chain Of evening rain, Unraveled from the tumbling main, And threading the eye of a yellow star: So many times do I love again.” It is not in this fairy fashion that the truly modern poet declares his passion; it is not thus that Wordsworth sings to us of Lucy, the most alluring and shadowy figure in English poetry,--Lucy, richly dowered with a few short verses of unapproachable beauty. To the lover of Wordsworth her death is a lasting hurt. We cannot endure to think of her as he thinks of her,-- “Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course With rocks, and stones, and trees.” We cannot endure that anything so fine and rare should slip forever from the sunshine, and that the secret stars should look down upon her maidenhood no more. Browning, too, who has been termed the poet of love, who has revealed to us every changeful mood, every stifled secret, every light and shade of human emotion,--how has he dealt with his engrossing theme? Beneath his unsparing touch, at once burning and subtle, the soul lies bare, and its passions rend it like hounds. All that is noble, generous, suffering, shameful, finds in him its ablest exponent. Those strange, fantastic sentences in which Mr. Pater has analyzed the inscrutable sorcery of Mona Lisa, beneath whose weary eyelids “the thoughts and experiences of the world lie shadowed,” might also fitly portray the image of Love, as Browning has unveiled him to our sight. He too is older than the rocks, and the secrets of the grave and of the deep seas are in his keeping. He too expresses all that man has come to desire in the ways of a thousand years, and his is the beauty “into which the soul with its maladies has passed.” The slumbering centuries lie coiled beneath his feet, their hidden meaning is his to grasp, their huge and restless impulses have nourished him, their best results are his inheritance. But he is not glad, for the maladies of the soul have stilled his laughter, and the brightness of youth has fled. BOOKS THAT HAVE HINDERED ME.