The subject of his youth is the passion of love, as it was in Browning's _Pauline_.

The subjects of his manhood are serious with other thought and feeling, sad with another sadness, happy with another happiness.

They traverse a wider range of human feeling and thought, and when they speak of love, it is of love in its wiser, steadier, graver and less selfish forms.

It was so with Browning, who far sooner than his comrades, escaped from the tangled wilderness of youthful passion.

It is curious to think that so young a creature as he was in 1833 should have left the celebration of the love of woman behind him, and only written of the love which his _Paracelsus_ images in Aprile.