"Ce soir encor je t'ai vu m'apparaître, C'était par une triste nuit. L'aile des vents battait à ma fenêtre; J'étais seul, courbé sur mon lit. J'y regardais une place chérie, Tiède encor d'un baiser brûlant; Et je songeais comme la femme oublie, Et je sentais un lambeau de ma vie, Qui se déchirait lentement. Je rassemblais des lettres de la veille, Des cheveux, des débris d'amour. Tout ce passé me criait à l'oreille Ses éternels serments d'un jour. Je contemplais ces réliques sacrées, Qui me faisaient trembler la main: Larmes du coeur par le coeur devorées, Et que les yeux qui les avaient pleurées Ne reconnaîtront plus demain!"[37] [Footnote 37: Musset, _Nuit de décembre_.] The same quest of the problematic which attracted Browning to the poetry of passion repelled or unrequited made him a curious student also of fainter and feebler "wars of love"--embryonic or simulated forms of passion which stood still farther from his personal experience. _A Light Woman, A Pretty Woman_, and _Another Way of Love_ are refined studies in this world of half tones. But the most important and individual poem of this group is _The Statue and the Bust_, an excellent example of the union in Browning of the Romantic temper with a peculiar mastery of everything in human nature which traverses and repudiates Romance. The duke and the lady are simpler and slighter Hamlets--Hamlets who have no agonies of self-questioning and self-reproach; intervening in the long pageant of the famous lovers of romantic tradition with the same disturbing shock as he in the bead-roll of heroic avengers. The poet's indignant denunciation of his lovers at the close, apparently for not violating the vows of marriage, is puzzling to readers who do not appreciate the extreme subtlety of Browning's use of figure. He was at once too much and too little of a casuist,--too habituated to fine distinctions and too unaware of the pitfalls they often present to others,--to understand that in condemning his lovers for wanting the energy to commit a crime he could be supposed to imply approval of the crime they failed to commit.