in it and without,
To clasp thee,--but in vain! Thy soul
Still shrunk from Him who made the whole,
Still set deliberate aside
His love!--Now take love! Well betide
Thy tardy conscience!"[A]

[Footnote A: _Easter Day._]

In his later reflective poems, in which he deals with the problems of
life in the spirit of a metaphysician, seeking a definite answer to the
questions of the intelligence, he declares the reason for his preference
of love to knowledge. In _La Saisiaz_ he states that man's love is God's
too, a spark from His central fire; but man's knowledge is man's only.
Knowledge is finite, limited and tinged with sense. The truth we reach
at best is only truth _for us_, relative, distorted. We are for ever
kept from the fact which is supposed to be given; our intellects play
about it; sense and even intellect itself are interposing media, which
we must use, and yet, in using them, we only fool ourselves with
semblances. The poet has now grown so cautious that he will not declare
his own knowledge to be valid for any other man. David Hume could
scarcely be more suspicious of the human intellect; nor Berkeley more
surely persuaded of the purely subjective nature of its attainments. In
fact, the latter relied on human knowledge in a way impossible to
Browning, for he regarded it as the language of spirit speaking to
spirit. Out of his experience, Browning says,

"There crowds conjecture manifold.
But, as knowledge, this comes only,--things may be as I behold
Or may not be, but, without me and above me, things there are;
I myself am what I know not--ignorance which proves no bar
To the knowledge that I am, and, since I am, can recognize
What to me is pain and pleasure: this is sure, the rest--surmise."[A]

[Footnote A: _La Saisiaz_.]

Thought itself, for aught he knows, may be afflicted with a kind of
colour-blindness; and he knows no appeal when one affirms "green as
grass," and another contradicts him with "red as grass." Under such
circumstances, it is not strange that Browning should decline to speak
except for himself, and that he will

"Nowise dare to play the spokesman for my brothers strong or weak,"

or that he will far less presume to pronounce for God, and pretend that
the truth finds utterance from lips of clay--

"Pass off human lisp as echo of the sphere-song out of reach."

"Have I knowledge? Confounded it shrivels at Wisdom laid bare!
Ha