the least, in the line which handed on the torch of Plato. The author of
the _Phoedrus_ saw in the ecstasy of Love one of the avenues to the
knowledge of the things that indeed are. To Dante the supreme realities
were mirrored in the eyes of Beatrice. For Shelley Love was interwoven
through all the mazes of Being; it was the source of the strength by
which man masters his gods. To all these masters of idealism Browning's
vision of Love owed something of its intensity and of its range. With
the ethical Love of Jesus and St Paul his affinities were more apparent,
but less profound. For him, too, love was the sum of all morality and
the root of all goodness. But it resembled more the joyous
self-expansion of the Greek than the humility and self-abnegation of
Christian love. Not the saintly ascetic nor the doer of good works, but
the artist and the "lover," dominated his imagination when he wrote of
Love; imbuing even God's love for the world with the joy of creation and
the rapture of embrace. Aprile's infinite love for things impelled him
to body them visibly forth. Deeper in Browning than his Christianity,
and prior to it, lay his sense of immeasurable worth in all life, the
poet's passion for being.

[Footnote 145: _Red-cotton Night-cap Country_.]

Browning's poetry is thus one of the most potent of the influences which
in the nineteenth century helped to break down the shallow and
mischievous distinction between the "sacred" and the "secular," and to
set in its place the profounder division between man enslaved by apathy,
routine, and mechanical morality, and man lifted by the law of love into
a service which is perfect freedom, into an approximation to God which
is only the fullest realisation of humanity.