He asserts this again and again; with the greatest force in _A Pillar at Sebzevar_, and, more lightly, in _Cherries_.

Yet, and this is a pity, he is not satisfied with the decision of love, but spends pages in argumentative discussions which lead him away from that poetical treatment of the subjects which love alone, as the master, would have enabled him to give.

However, the treatment that love gives we find in the lyrics at the end of each _Fancy_; and some of these lyrics are of such delicate and subtle beauty that I am tempted to think that they were written at an earlier period, and their _Fancies_ composed to fit them.

If they were written now, it is plain that age had not disenabled him from walking with pleasure and power among those sweet, enamelled meadows of poetry in whose soil he now thought great poetry did not grow.

And when we read the lyrics, our regret is all the more deep that he chose the thorn-clad and desert lands, where barren argument goes round and round its subjects without ever finding the true path to their centre.
He lost himself more completely in this error in _Parleyings with Certain People_, in which book, with the exception of the visionary landscapes in _Gerard de Lairesse_, and some few passages in _Francis Furini_ and _Charles Avison_, imagination, such as belongs to a poet, has deserted Browning.