[Footnote 143: _The Pope_.]

But with all its insurgent emancipating vehemence Love was for Browning,
also, the very ground of stable and harmonious existence, "the energy of
integration," as Myers has finely said, "which makes a cosmos of the sum
of things," the element of permanence, of law. True, its harmony was of
the kind which admits discord and eschews routine; its law that which is
of eternity and not of yesterday; its stability that which is only
assured and fortified by the chivalry that plucks a Pompilia, or an
Alcestis, from their legal doom. The true anarchist, as he sometimes
dared to hint, was the cold unreason of duty which, as in _Bifurcation_,
keeps lovers meant for each other apart. It is by love that the soul
solves the problem--so tragically insoluble to poor Sordello--of
"fitting to the finite its infinity," and satisfying the needs of Time
and Eternity at once;[144] for Love, belonging equally to both spheres,
can bring the purposes of body and soul into complete accord:

"Like yonder breadth of watery heaven, a bay
And that sky-space of water, ray for ray
And star for star, one richness where they mixed,
As this and that wing of an angel, fixed
Tumultuary splendours."

[Footnote 144: _Sordello, sub fin_.]

In a life thus thrilled into harmony heaven was already realised on
earth; and Eternity itself could but continue what Time had begun.
Death, for such a soul, was not an awaking, for it had not slept; nor an
emancipation, for it was already free; nor a satisfying of desire, for
the essence of Love was to want; it was only a point at which the "last