wning might have said, the excuse for God having deliberately made us
defective. Had we been made good, had we no strife with evil; had we the
power to embody at once the beauty we are capable of seeing; could we
have laid our hand on truth, and grasped her without the desperate
struggle we have to win one fruit from her tree; had we had no strong
crying and tears, no agony against wrong, against our own passions and
their work, against false views of things--we might have been angels;
but we should not have had humanity and all its wild history, and all
its work; we should not have had that which, for all I know, may be
unique in the universe; no, nor any of the great results of the battle
and its misery. Had it not been for the defectiveness, the sin and pain,
we should have had nothing of the interest of the long evolution of
science, law and government, of the charm of discovery, of pursuit, of
the slow upbuilding of moral right, of the vast variety of philosophy.
Above all, we should have had none of the great art men love so well, no
_Odyssey_, _Divine Comedy_ no _Hamlet_, no _Oedipus_, no Handel, no
Beethoven, no painting or sculpture where the love and sorrow of the
soul breathe in canvas, fresco, marble and bronze, no, nor any of the
great and loving lives who suffered and overcame, from Christ to the
poor woman who dies for love in a London lane. All these are made
through the struggle and the sorrow. We should not have had, I repeat,
humanity; and provided no soul perishes for ever but lives to find union
with undying love, the game, with all its terrible sorrow, pays for the
candle. We may find out, some day, that the existence and work of
humanity, crucified as it has been, are of untold interest and use to
the universe--which things the angels desire to look into. If Browning
had listened to that view, he would, I think, have accepted it.

_Old Pictures in Florence_ touches another side of his theory.
In itself, it is one of Browning's half-humorous poems; a
pleasantly-composed piece, glancing here and glancing there, as a man's
mind does when leaning over a hill-villa's parapet on a sunny morning
in Florence. I have elsewhere quoted its beginning. It is a fine example
of his nature-poetry: it creates the scenery and atmosphere of the poem;
and the four lines with which the fourth verse closes sketch what
Browning thought to be one of his poetic gifts--

And mark through the winter afternoons.
B