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 such a hope is all that we can expect or ought to desire.  The absolute assurance of a future life and of rewards and punishments consequent on our deeds in the present world would defeat the very end for which, according to the hypothesis, we are placed here; it would be fatal to the purpose of our present life considered as a state of probation.  What such a state of probation requires is precisely what we have—­hope; no less than this and no more.  Does our heaven overcloud because we lack certainty?  No: 

    Hope the arrowy, just as constant, comes to pierce its gloom, compelled
    By a power and by a purpose which, if no one else beheld,
    I behold in life, so—­hope!

Such is the conclusion with Browning of the whole matter.  It is in entire accordance with a letter which he wrote two years previously to a lady who supposed herself to be dying, and who had thanked him for help derived from his poems:  “All the help I can offer, in my poor degree, is the assurance that I see ever more reason to hold by the same hope—­and that by no means in ignorance of what has been advanced to the contrary....  God bless you, sustain you, and receive you.”  To Dr Moncure Conway, who had lost a son, Browning wrote:  “If I, who cannot, would restore your son, He who can, will.”  And Mr Rudolph Lehmann records his words in conversation:  “I have doubted and denied it [a future life], and I fear have even printed my doubts; but now I am as deeply convinced that there is something after death.  If you ask me what, I no more know it than my dog knows who and what I am.  He knows that I am there and that is enough for him."[120]