be with others, for my own part I
can pronounce upon the relation of joy to sorrow in this my life on
earth:--

I must say--or choke in silence----"Howsoever came my fate,
Sorrow did and joy did nowise--life well weighed--preponderate."

If this failure be ordained by necessity, I shall bear it as best I can;
but, if this life be all, nothing shall force me to say that life has
proceeded from a cause supreme in goodness, wisdom, and power. What I
find here is goodness always intermixed with evil; wisdom which means an
advance from error to the confession of ignorance; power that is
insufficient to adapt a human being to his surroundings even in the
degree in which a worm is fitted to the leaf on which it feeds.

Browning tacitly rejects the idea that the world is the work of some
blind, force; and undoubtedly our reason, which endeavours to reduce all
things in nature to rational conceptions, demands that we should
conceive the world as rational rather than as some wild work of chance.
Upon one hypothesis, and upon one alone, can the life of man upon this
globe appear the result of intelligence:

I have lived then, done and suffered, loved and hated, learnt and taught
This--there is no reconciling wisdom with a world distraught,
Goodness with triumphant evil, power with failure in the aim,
If (to my own sense, remember! though none other feel the same!)
If you bar me from assuming earth to be a pupil's place,
And life, time,--with all their chances, changes,--just probation--space,
Mine for me.

Grant this hypothesis, and all changes from irrational to rational, from
evil to good, from pain to a strenuous joy:--

Only grant a second life, I acquiesce
In this present life as failure, count misfortune's worst assaults
Triumph, not defeat, assured that loss so much the more exalts
Gain about to be.

Thus out of defeat springs victory; never are we so near to knowledge as
when we are checked at the bounds of ignorance; beauty is felt through
its opposite; good is known through evil; truth shows its potency when
it is confronted by falsehood;

While for love--Oh how but, losing love, does whoso loves succeed
By the death-pang to the birth-throe--learning what is love indeed?

Yet at best this idea of a future life remains a conjecture, an
hypothesis, a hope, which gives a key to the mysteries of our troubled
earthly state. Browning proceeds to argue that