Or, instead of this systole and diastole alternation, the glory and the pang are fused and interpenetrated in a continuous mood. Such a mood furnishes the spiritual woof of one of Browning's most consummate and one of his loveliest lyrics, _The Last Ride Together_ and _Evelyn Hope_. "How are we to take it?" asks Mr Fotheringham of the latter. "As the language of passion resenting death and this life's woeful incompleteness? or as a prevision of the soul in a moment of intensest life?" The question may be asked; yet the passion of regret which glows and vibrates through it is too suffused with exalted faith in a final recovery to find poignant expression. This lyric, with its taking melody, has delighted thousands to whom Browning is otherwise "obscure," partly because it appeals with naïve audacity at once to Romantic and to Christian sentiment--combining the faith in love's power to seal its object for ever as its own with the Christian faith in personal immortality--a personal immortality in which there is yet marrying and giving in marriage, as Romance demands. _The Last Ride Together_ has attracted a different audience. Its passion is of a rarer and more difficult kind, less accessible to the love and less flattering to the faith of common minds. This lover dreams of no future recovery of more than he still retains; his love, once for all, avails nothing; and the secure faith of Evelyn's lover, that "God creates the love to reward the love," is not his. His mistress will never "awake and remember and understand." But that dead form he is permitted to clasp; and in the rapture of that phantom companionship passion and thought slowly transfigure and glorify his fate, till from the lone limbo of outcast lovers he seems to have penetrated to the innermost fiery core of life, which art and poetry grope after in vain--to possess that supreme moment of earth which, prolonged, is heaven. "What if heaven be that, fair and strong At life's best, with our eyes upturned Whither life's flower is first discerned, We, fixed so, ever should so abide? What if we still ride on, we two With life for ever old yet new, Changed not in kind but in degree, The instant made eternity,-- And heaven just prove that I and she Ride, ride together, for ever ride?" The "glory of failure" is with Browning a familiar and inexhaustible theme; but its spiritual abstraction here flushes with the human glory of possession; the æthereal light and dew are mingled with breath and blood; and in the wonderful long-drawn rhythm of the verse we hear the steady stride of the horses as they bear their riders farther and farther in to the visionary land of Romance.