They are beautiful with a beauty of their own; full of that natural abandonment of the whole world for one moment with the woman loved, which youth and the hours of youth in manhood feel.

I should have been sorry if Browning had not shaped into song this abandonment.

He loved the natural, and was convinced of its rightness; and he had, as I might prove, a tenderness for it even when it passed into wrong.

He was the last man in the world to think that the passion of noble sexual love was to be despised.

And it is pleasant to find, at the end of his long poetic career, that, in a serious and wise old age, he selected, to form part of his last book, poems of youthful and impassioned love, in which the senses and the spirit met, each in their pre-eminence.
The two first of these, _Now_ and _Summum Bonum_, must belong to his youth, though from certain turns of expression and thought in them, it seems that Browning worked on them at the time he published them.