Love were as plain to see."[A]

[Footnote: A _Reverie--Asolando_.]

Love yielded to him, as Reason did to Hegel, a fundamental exposition of
the nature of things. Or, to express the same thing in another way, it
was a deliberate hypothesis, which he sought to apply to facts and to
test by their means, almost in the same manner as that in which natural
science applies and tests its principles.

That Browning's ethical and religious ideas were for him something
different from, and perhaps more than, mere poetic sentiments, will, I
believe, be scarcely denied. That he held a deliberate theory, and held
it with greater and greater difficulty as he became older, and as his
dialectical tendencies grew and threatened to wreck his artistic
freedom, is evident to any one who regards his work as a whole. But it
will not be admitted so readily that anything other than harm can issue
from an attempt to deal with him as if he were a philosopher. Even if it
be allowed that he held and expressed a definite theory, will it retain
any value if we take it out of the region of poetry and impassioned
religious faith, into the frigid zone of philosophical inquiry? Could
any one maintain, apart from the intoxication of religious and poetic
sentiment, that the essence of existence is love? As long as we remain
within the realm of imagination, it may be argued, we may find in our
poet's great sayings both solacement and strength, both rest and an
impulse towards higher moral endeavour; but if we seek to treat them as
theories of facts, and turn upon them the light of the understanding,
will they not inevitably prove to be hallucinations? Poetry, we think,
has its own proper place and function. It is an invaluable anodyne to
the cark and care of reflective thought; an opiate which, by steeping