One by one came lamping—­chiefly that prepotency of Mars.

While he climbs towards the summit he is aware of “Earth’s most exquisite disclosures, heaven’s own God in evidence”; he stands face to face with Nature—­“rather with Infinitude.”  All through his mountain ascent the vigour of life is aroused within him; and, as he returns—­there is her grave.

The idea of a future life, for which this earthly life serves as an education and a test, is so central with Browning, so largely influences all his feelings and penetrates all his art, that it is worth while to attend to the course of his argument and the nature of his conclusion.  He puts the naked question to himself—­What does death mean?  Is it total extinction?  Is it a passage into life?—­without any vagueness, without any flattering metaphor; he is prepared to accept or endure any answer if only it be the truth.  Whether his discussion leads to a trustworthy result or not, the sincerity and the energy of his endeavour after truth serve to banish all supine and half-hearted moods.  The debate, of which his poem is a report, falls into two parts:  first, a statement of facts; secondly, a series of conjectures—­conjectures and no more—­rising from the basis of facts that are ascertained.  To put the question, “Shall I survive death?” is to assume that I exist and that something other than myself exists which causes me now to live and presently to die.  The nature of this power outside myself I do not know; we may for convenience call it “God.”  Beyond these two facts—­myself and a power environing me—­nothing is known with certainty which has any bearing on the matter in dispute.  I am like a floating rush borne onward by a stream; whither borne the rush cannot tell; but rush and stream are facts that cannot be questioned.

Knowing that I exist—­Browning goes on—­I know what for me is pain and what is pleasure.  And, however it may 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: