_POEMS OF THE PASSION OF LOVE_ When we leave _Paracelsus_, _Sordello_ and the _Dramas_ behind, and find ourselves among the host of occasional poems contained in the _Dramatic Lyrics_ and _Romances_, in _Men and Women_, in _Dramatis Personae_, and in the later volumes, it is like leaving an unencumbered sea for one studded with a thousand islands.

Every island is worth a visit and different from the rest.

Their variety, their distinct scenery, their diverse inhabitants, the strange surprises in them, are as continual an enchantment for the poetic voyager as the summer isles of the Pacific.
But while each of them is different from the rest, yet, like the islands in the Pacific, they fall into groups; and to isolate these groups is perhaps the best way to treat so varied a collection of poems.

To treat them chronologically would be a task too long and wearisome for a book.
To treat them zoologically, if I may borrow that term, is possible, and may be profitable.

This chapter is dedicated to the poems which relate to Love.
Commonly speaking, the term _Love Poems_ does not mean poems concerning the absolute Love, or the love of Ideas, such as Truth or Beauty, or Love of mankind or one's own country, or the loves that belong to home, or the love of friends, or even married love unless it be specially bound up, as it is in Browning's poem of _By the Fireside_, with ante-nuptial love--but poems expressing the isolating passion of one sex for the other; chiefly in youth, or in conditions which resemble those of youth, whether moral or immoral.