_THE PASSIONS OTHER THAN LOVE_ The poems on which I have dwelt in the last chapter, though they are mainly concerned with love between the sexes, illustrate the other noble passions, all of which, such as joy, are forms of, or rather children of, self-forgetful love.

They do not illustrate the evil or ignoble passions--envy, jealousy, hatred, base fear, despair, revenge, avarice and remorse--which, driven by the emotion that so fiercely and swiftly accumulates around them, master the body and soul, the intellect and the will, like some furious tyrant, and in their extremes hurry their victim into madness.

Browning took some of these terrible powers and made them subjects in his poetry.

Short, sharp-outlined sketches of them occur in his dramas and longer poems.

There is no closer image in literature of long-suppressed fear breaking out into its agony of despair than in the lines which seal Guido's pleading in the _The Ring and the Book_.
Life is all! I was just stark mad,--let the madman live Pressed by as many chains as you please pile! Don't open! Hold me from them! I am yours, I am the Grand Duke's--no, I am the Pope's! Abate,--Cardinal,--Christ,--Maria,--God, ...
Pompilia, will you let them murder me?
But there is no elaborate, long-continued study of these sordid and evil things in Browning.