Being a complete and a sane human creature, Browning could not rest content with the vicious asceticism of the intellect which calls itself scientific because it refuses to recognise any facts that are not material and tangible.  Science itself, in the true sense of the word, exists and progresses by ventures of imaginative faith.  And in all matters which involve good and evil, hopes and fears, in all matters which determine the conduct of life, no rational person excludes from his view the postulates of our moral nature or should exclude the final option of the will.  The person whose beliefs are determined by material facts alone and by the understanding unallied with our other powers is the irrational and unscientific person.  Being a complete and sane human creature, Browning was assured that the visible order of things is part of a larger order, the existence of which alone makes human life intelligible to the reason.  The understanding being incapable of arriving unaided at a decision between rival theories of life, and neutrality between these being irrational and illegitimate, he rightly determined the balance with the weight of emotion, and rightly acted upon that decision with all the energy of his will.  His chief intellectual error was not that he undervalued the results of the intellect, but that he imagined the existence as a part of sane human nature, of a wholly irrational intellect which in affairs of religious belief and conduct is indifferent to the promptings of the emotions and the moral nature.

Browning’s optimism has been erroneously ascribed to his temperament.  He declared that in his personal experience the pain of life outweighed its pleasure.  He remembered former pain more vividly than he remembered pleasure.  His optimism was part of the vigorous sanity of his moral nature; like a reasonable man, he made the happiness which he did not find.  If any person should censure the process of giving objective validity to a moral postulate, he has only to imagine some extra-human intelligence making a study of human nature; to such an intelligence our moral postulates would be objective facts and have the value of objective evidence.  That whole of which our life on earth forms a part could not be conceived by Browning as rational without also being conceived as good.

All the parts of Browning’s nature were vigorous, and they worked harmoniously together.  His senses were keen and alert; his understanding was both penetrating and comprehensive; his passions had sudden explosive force and also steadfastness and persistency; his will supported his other powers and perhaps it had too large a share in his later creative work.  His feeling for external nature was twofold; he enjoyed colour and form—­but especially colour—­as a feast for the eye, and returned thanks for his meal as the Pope of his poem did for the bean-feast.  This was far removed from that passionate spiritual contemplation of nature of the Wordsworthian mood.