His metaphysical thinking thus became an effort to reconcile an
all-embracing synthesis with a sense of individuality as stubborn and
acute as ever man had. Body and Soul, Nature and Spirit, Man and God,
Good and Evil, he presented now as co-operative or alien, now as hostile
antagonists or antitheses. That their opposition is not ultimate, that
evil is at bottom a form of good, and all finite existence a passing
mode of absolute being, was a conviction towards which his thought on
one side constantly strove, which it occasionally touched, but in which
it could not securely rest. Possessed by the thirst for absoluteness, he
vindicated the "infinity" of God and the soul by banishing all the
"finiteness" of sense into a limbo of illusion. The infinite soul,
imprisoned for life in a body which at every moment clogs its motion and
dims its gaze, fights its way through the shows of sense,[124] "which
ever proving false still promise to be true," until death opens the
prison-gate and restores the captive to its infinity. Sorrow and evil
were stains imposed by Time upon the white radiance of an eternal being;
and Browning sometimes rose, though with a less sure step, to the
dizzier height of holding Time itself to be unreal, and the soul's
earthly life not an episode in an endless sequence, but a dream of
progressive change imposed upon a changeless and timeless essence.

[Footnote 124: _Fifine at the Fair._]

But there were, as has been said, elements in Browning's mental make
which kept this abstract and formal theory, fortified though it was by
theological prepossessions, in check. His most intense consciousness,
his most definite grip upon reality, was too closely bound up with the
collisions and jostlings, the limits and angularities, of the world of