It seems a little insensitive in so young a man.

But I do not think Browning was ever quite young save at happy intervals; and this falls in with the fact that his imagination was more intellectual than passionate; that while he felt love, he also analysed, even dissected it, as he wrote about it; that it scarcely ever carried him away so far as to make him forget everything but itself.

Perhaps once or twice, as in _The Last Ride Together_, he may have drawn near to this absorption, but even then the man is thinking more of his own thoughts than of the woman by his side, who must have been somewhat wearied by so silent a companion.

Even in _By the Fireside_, when he is praising the wife whom he loved with all his soul, and recalling the moment of early passion while yet they looked on one another and felt their souls embrace before they spoke--it is curious to find him deviating from the intensity of the recollection into a discussion of what might have been if she had not been what she was--a sort of _excursus_ on the chances of life which lasts for eight verses--before he returns to that immortal moment.

Even after years of married life, a poet, to whom passion has been in youth supreme, would scarcely have done that.