t of another heart, glows and
enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon
the universal heart of all, and so lights up the world and all nature
with its generous flames." Both love and reason alike pass through stage
after stage, always away from the particularity of selfishness and
ignorance, into larger and larger cycles of common truth and goodness,
towards the full realization of knowledge and benevolence, which is the
inheritance of emancipated man. In this transition, the sensuous play of
feeling within man, and the sensitive responses to external stimuli, are
made more and more organic to ends which are universal, that is, to
spiritual ends. Love, which in its earliest form, seems to be the
natural yearning of brute for brute, appearing and disappearing at the
suggestion of physical needs, passes into an idealized sentiment, into
an emotion of the soul, into a principle of moral activity which
manifests itself in a permanent outflow of helpful deeds for man. It
represents, when thus sublimated, one side at least of the expansion of
the self, which culminates when the world beats in the pulse of the
individual, and the joys and sorrows, the defeats and victories of
mankind are felt by him as his own. It is no longer dependent merely on
the incitement of youth, grace, beauty, whether of body or character; it
transcends all limitations of sex and age, and finds objects on which it
can spend itself in all that God has made, even in that which has
violated its own law of life and become mean and pitiful. It becomes a
love of fallen humanity, and an ardour to save it by becoming the
conscious and permanent motive of all men. The history of this evolution
of love has been written by the poets. Every phase through which this
ever-deepening emotion has passed, every form which this primary power
has taken in its growth, has received from them its own proper
expression. They have made even the grosser instincts lyric with beauty;
and, ascending with their theme, they have sung the pure passion of soul
for soul, its charm and its strength, its idealism and heroism, up to
the point at which, in Browning, it transcends the limits of finite
existence, sheds all its earthly vesture, and becomes a spiritual
principle of religious aspiration and self-surrender to God.

Browning nowhere shows his native strength more clearly than in his
treatment of love. He has touched this world-old theme--which almos