Autumn has come like Spring returned to us
Won from her girlishness.
... the trees bend
O'er it as wild men watch a sleeping girl.
So, when Spring comes
With sunshine back again like an old smile.
I am to sing whilst ebbing day dies soft,
As a lean scholar dies worn o'er his book,
And in the heaven stars steal out one by one
As hunted men steal to their mountain watch.
Browning's love for the dramatic was so intense that he carried it
into every kind of poetry that he wrote. Various classes of his
works he called _Dramas, Dramatic Lyrics, Dramatic Romances,
Dramatic Idyls, Dramatis Personae_. In one of her prefaces,
Elizabeth Barrett had employed--for the first time in English
literature, I think--the term _Dramatic Lyric_. This naturally
appealed to Browning, and he gave the title in 1842 to his first
published collection of short poems. At first blush "dramatic lyric"
sounds like a contradiction in terms, like "non-mathematical algebra.
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