The thing's restorative I' the touch and sight.
But in his lyrics, it was not the steady development of life on which he loved to write, but the unexpected, original movement of life under the push of quick thought and sudden passion into some new form of action which broke through the commonplace of existence.

Men and women, and chiefly women, when they spoke and acted on a keen edge of life with a precipice below them or on the summit of the moment, with straight and clear intensity, and out of the original stuff of their nature--were his darling lyric subjects.

And he did this work in lyrics, because the lyric is the poem of the moment.
There was one of these critical moments which attracted him greatly--that in which all after-life is contained and decided; when a step to the right or left settles, in an instant, the spiritual basis of the soul.

I have already mentioned some of these poems--those concerned with love, such as _By the Fireside_ or _Cristina_--and the woman is more prominent in them than the man.

One of the best of them, so far as the drawing of a woman is concerned, is _Dis aliter visum_.