The triumph of Browning's united lovers has often a superb Elizabethan note of defiance. Passion obliterates for them the past and throws a mystically hued veil over Nature. The gentle Romantic sentiments hardly touch the fresh springs of their emotion. They may meet and woo "among the ruins," as Coleridge met and wooed his Genevieve "beside the ruined tower"; but their song does not, like his, "suit well that ruin old and hoary," but, on the contrary, tramples with gay scorn upon the lingering memories of the ruined city,--a faded pageant yoked to its triumphal car. "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"--