ve I forethought? how purblind, how blank, to the Infinite Care!

* * * * *

"And thus looking within and around me, I ever renew
(With that stoop of the soul, which in bending upraises it too)
The submission of man's nothing-perfect to God's all-complete,
As by each new obeisance in spirit, I climb to His feet."[B]

[Footnote B: _Saul_, III.]

But David finds in himself one faculty so supreme in worth that he keeps
it in abeyance--

"Lest, insisting to claim and parade in it, wot ye, I worst
E'en the Giver in one gift.--Behold, I could love if I durst!
But I sink the pretension as fearing a man may o'ertake
God's own speed in the one way of love: I abstain for love's sake."[A]

[Footnote A: _Saul_, III.]

This faculty of love, so far from being tainted with finitude, like
knowledge; so far from being mere man's, or a temporary and deceptive
power given to man for temporary uses, by a Creator who has another
ineffably higher way of loving, as He has of truth, is itself divine. In
contrast with the activity of love, Omnipotence itself dwindles into
insignificance, and creation sinks into a puny exercise of power. Love,
in a word, is the highest good; and, as such, it has all its worth in
itself, and gives to all other things what worth they have. God Himself
gains the "ineffable crown" by showing love and saving the weak. It is
the power divine, the central energy of God's being.

Browning never forgets this moral or religious quality of love. So pure
is this emotion to the poet, "so perfect in whiteness, that it will not
take pollution; but, ermine-like, is armed from dishonour by its own
soft snow." In the corruptest hearts, amidst the worst sensuality, love
is still a power divine, making for all goodness. Even when it is
kindled into flame by an illicit touch, and wars against the life of the
family, which is its own product, its worth is supreme. He who has
learned to love in any way, has "caught God's secret." How he has caught
it, whom he loves, whether or not he is loved in return, all these
things matter little. The paramount question on which hangs man's fate
is, has he learned to love another, any other, Fifine or Elvire. "She
has lost me," said the unloved lover; "I have gained her. Her soul's
mine."

The supreme worth of love, the mere emotion itself, however called into
activity, secures it against all taint. No one who understands Browning
in the le