But, even if it be considered that it is not altogether just to apply these critical tests to the poet’s teaching, and to make him pay the penalty for assuming a place amongst philosophers, it is certain that what he says of man’s spiritual life cannot be rightly valued, till it is regarded in the light of his guiding principles.  We shall miss much of what is best in him, even as a poet, if, for instance, we regard his treatment of love merely as the expression of elevated passion, or his optimism as based upon mere hope.  Love was to him rather an indwelling element in the world, present, like power, in everything.

  “From the first, Power was—­I knew. 
    Life has made clear to me
  That, strive but for closer view,
    Love were as plain to see."[A]

[Footnote:  A Reverie—­Asolando.]

Love yielded to him, as Reason did to Hegel, a fundamental exposition of the nature of things.  Or, to express the same thing in another way, it was a deliberate hypothesis, which he sought to apply to facts and to test by their means, almost in the same manner as that in which natural science applies and tests its principles.

That Browning’s ethical and religious ideas were for him something different from, and perhaps more than, mere poetic sentiments, will, I believe, be scarcely denied.  That he held a deliberate theory, and held it with greater and greater difficulty as he became older, and as his dialectical tendencies grew and threatened to wreck his artistic freedom, is evident to any one who regards his work as a whole.  But it will not be admitted so readily that anything other than harm can issue from an attempt to deal with him as if he were a philosopher.  Even if it be allowed that he held and expressed a definite theory, will it retain any value if we take it out of the region of poetry and impassioned religious faith, into the frigid zone of philosophical inquiry?  Could any one maintain, apart from the intoxication of religious and poetic sentiment, that the essence of existence is love?  As long as we remain within the realm of imagination, it may be argued, we may find in our poet’s great sayings both solacement and strength, both rest and an impulse towards higher moral endeavour; but if we seek to treat them as theories of facts, and turn upon them the light of the understanding, will they not inevitably prove to be hallucinations?  Poetry, we think, has its own proper place and function.  It is an invaluable anodyne to the cark and care of reflective thought; an opiate which, by steeping the critical intellect in slumber, sets the soul free to rise on the wings of religious faith.  But reason breaks the spell; and the world of poetry, and religion—­a world which to them is always beautiful and good with God’s presence—­becomes a system of inexorable laws, dead, mechanical, explicable in strict truth, as an equipoise of constantly changing forms of energy.