kness from light, we may be assured that it has more than a
dramatic value. And, once more, if again and again the same idea shows
its power over the feelings and inspires elevated lyrical utterance, or
if in pieces of casuistical brain-work it enters as a passionate element
and domineers by its own authority, if it originates not debate but song
or that from which song is made, we know that the writer's heart has
embraced it as a truth of the emotions.

Because Browning had his own well-defined view of truth, he could
confidently lend his mind away to his fifty or his hundred men and
women. They served to give his ideas a concrete body. By sympathy and by
intelligence he widened the basis of his own existence. If the poet
loses himself to find himself again through sympathy with external
nature, how much more and in how many enriching ways through sympathy
with humanity! Thus new combinations of thought and feeling are
effected. Thus a kind of experiment is made with our own ideas by
watching how they behave when brought into connection with these new
combinations. Truth is relative, and the best truth of our own is worth
testing under various conditions and circumstances. The truth or
falsehood which is not our own has a right to say the best for itself
that can be said. Let truth and falsehood grapple. Let us hear the
counter-truth or the rival falsehood which is the complement or the
criticism of our own, and hear it stated with the utmost skill. A
Luther would surely be the wiser for an evening spent in company with a
Blougram; and Blougram has things to tell us which Luther never knew.
But precisely because truth is relative we must finally adhere to our
own perceptions; they constitute the light for us; and the justice we
would do to others we must also render to ourselves. A wide survey may
be made from a fixed centre. "Universal sympathies," Miss Barrett wrote
in one of the letters to her future husband, "cannot make a man
inconsistent, but on the contrary sublimely consistent. A church tower
may stand between the mountains and the sea, looking to either, and
stand fast: but the willow tree at the gable-end blown now toward the
north and now toward the south, while its natural leaning is due east or
west, is different altogether ... _as_ different as a willow tree from a
church tower."[63]

The fifty poems of _Men and Women_, with a few exceptions, fall into
three principal groups--those which interpret variou