Browning has fittingly been called the poet of psychology.  He is a dissecter, a prober, an analyzer in the full spirit of scientific research.  He spares no pains to get at and to completely unfold the truth about man’s nature, to show all the hidden causes of his action, all the secret motives of his life, using this method as thoroughly as George Eliot.  It is interesting to note his attitude towards the great religious problems.  His faith in God is intensely passionate and sublime in its conception.  In words the most expressive in their meaning, and indicating a conviction the deepest, he reveals his faith.

                       “He glows above
  With scarce an intervention, presses close
  And palpitatingly, His soul o’er ours.”

The lifting and inspiring power of faith in an Infinite Being he has sung with a poet’s purity of vision.  Along with this faith goes his belief that man is being glowly perfected for a higher and nobler existence.

“To whom turn I but to Thee, the ineffable Name? 
Builder and maker, Thou, of houses not made with hands! 
What, have fear of change from Thee, who art ever the same? 
Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that Thy power expands? 
There shall never be one lost good!  What was, shall live as before;
The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound;
What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven the perfect round.

  “All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist;
    Not its likeness, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power
  Whose voice has gone forth, but, each survives for the melodist
    When eternity confirms the conceptions of an hour. 
  The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
    The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
  Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
    Enough that He heard it once:  we shall hear it by and by.”

He teaches that progress is the true mark and aim of man’s being, a progress sure and glorious.

  “Progress, man’s distinctive mark alone,
  Not God’s and not the beast’s; God is, they are,
  Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be.”

Man yearns after more than he can gain here; that yearning is the mark of his higher nature and the means of progress.  If he follows the better impulses of his nature, all experience will help to unfold his soul into higher attainments, and impulse will at last become, in clearer moments, revelation.

  “Oh, we’re sunk enough here, God knows! 
    But not quite so much that moments,
  Sure tho’ seldom, are denied us,
    When the spirit’s true endowments
  Stand out plainly from its false ones,
    And appraise it if pursuing
  Or the right way or the wrong way
    To its triumph or undoing. 
  There are flashes struck from midnights,