wn heart love had not been made wise
To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind,
To know even hate is but a mask of love's.
To see a good in evil, and a hope
In ill-success; to sympathize, be proud
Of their half-reasons, faint aspirings, dim
Struggles for truth, their poorest fallacies,
Their prejudice and fears and cares and doubts;
All with a touch of nobleness, despite
Their error, upward tending all though weak.

Browning's conception of the function and power of love is based on his
belief in its divine origin. Twice at least, in "Easter Day" and "Saul,"
his characters work out from an overpowering recognition of God's
omniscience and omnipotence to a final recognition that his love is
equal in scope with his power and knowledge. And he counts human service
as most complete when, as in David before Saul, it reaches out to God's
love and recruits its failing forces from the divine source.

Underlying Browning's doctrine of the value of love, and his doctrine of
progress and aspiration, is his belief in personal immortality. When he
was charged with being strongly against Darwin, with rejecting the
truths of science and regretting its advance, he answered that the idea
of a progressive development from senseless matter until man's
appearance had been a familiar conception to him from the beginning, but
he reiterated his constant faith in creative intelligence acting on
matter but not resulting from it. "Soul," he said, "is not matter, nor
from matter, but above." Two assumptions which though not susceptible of
proof he regards as "inescapable," are the existence of creative
intelligence and of "the subtle thing called spirit." When he argues out
the question of the immortality of this spirit, as in _La Saisiaz_, he
admits the subjective character of the evidence; but when he speaks
spontaneously out of his own feeling or experience, it is with positive
belief in life after death. To Mr. Sharp he said, "Death, death! It is
this harping on death that I do despise so much! Why, _amico mio_, you
know as well as I that death is life, just as our daily, our momentarily
dying body is none the less alive and ever recruiting new forces of
existence. Without death which is our crape-like church-yardy word for
change, for growth, there could be no prolongation of what we call life.
Pshaw, it is foolish to argue upon such a thing, even. For myself, I
deny death as an end of everything. Never say of