loses what he lived for
    And eternally must lose it.

Christina.

For life with all it yields of joy and woe
And hope and fear ... 
Is just our chance o’ the prize of learning love.

A Death in the Desert.

This is Browning’s central teaching, the key-note of his work and philosophy.  The importance of love in life is to Browning supreme, because he holds it to be the meeting-point between God and man.  Love is the sublimest conception possible to man; and a life inspired by it is the highest conceivable form of goodness.

In this exaltation of love, as in several other points, Browning much resembles the German mystic, Meister Eckhart.  To compare the two writers in detail would be an interesting task; it is only possible here to suggest points of resemblance.  The following passage from Eckhart suggests several directions in which Browning’s thought is peculiarly mystical:—­

Intelligence is the youngest faculty in man....  The soul in itself is a simple work; what God works in the simple light of the soul is more beautiful and more delightful than all the other works which He works in all creatures.  But foolish people take evil for good and good for evil.  But to him who rightly understands, the one work which God works in the soul is better and nobler and higher than all the world.  Through that light comes grace.  Grace never comes in the intelligence or in the will.  If it could come in the intelligence or in the will, the intelligence and the will would have to transcend themselves.  On this a master says:  There is something secret about it; and thereby he means the spark of the soul, which alone can apprehend God.  The true union between God and the soul takes place in the little spark, which is called the spirit of the soul.[9]

The essential unity of God and man is expressed more than once by Browning in Eckhart’s image:  as when he speaks of God as Him

    Who never is dishonoured in the spark
    He gave us from his fire of fires.

He is at one with Eckhart, and with all mystics, in his appeal from the intellect to that which is beyond intellect; in his assertion of the supremacy of feeling, intuition, over knowledge.  Browning never wearies of dwelling on the relativity of physical knowledge, and its inadequacy to satisfy man.  This is perhaps best brought out in one of the last things he wrote, the “Reverie” in Asolando; but it is dwelt on in nearly all his later and more reflective poems.  His maxim was—­

Wholly distrust thy knowledge, then, and trust
As wholly love allied to ignorance! 
There lies thy truth and safety. ... 
Consider well! 
Were knowledge all thy faculty, then God
Must be ignored:  love gains him by first leap.

A Pillar at Sebzevar.