is able to

  “Discern, compare, pronounce at last,
  This rage was right i’ the main,
  That acquiescence vain";[C]

[Footnote C:  Ibid.]

so man is able to penetrate beneath the apparently chaotic play of phenomena, and find in them law, and beauty, and goodness.  The laws which he finds by thought are not his inventions, but his discoveries.  The harmonies are in the organ, if the artist only knows how to elicit them.  Nay, the connection is still more intimate.  It is in the thought of man that silent nature finds its voice; it blooms into “meaning,” significance, thought, in him, as the plant shows its beauty in the flower.  Nature is making towards humanity, and in humanity it finds itself.

  “Striving to be man, the worm
  Mounts through all the spires of form."[A]

[Footnote A:  Emerson.]

The geologist, physicist, chemist, by discovering the laws of nature, do not bind unconnected phenomena; but they refute the hasty conclusion of sensuous thought, that the phenomena ever were unconnected.  Men of science do not introduce order into chance and chaos, but show that there never was chance or chaos.  The poet does not make the world beautiful, but finds the beauty that is dwelling there.  Without him, indeed, the beauty would not be, any more than the life of the tree is beautiful until it has evolved its potencies into the outward form.  Nevertheless, he is the expression of what was before, and the beauty was there in potency, awaiting its expression.  “Only let his thoughts be of equal scope, and the frame will suit the picture,” said Emerson.

            “The winds
  Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout,
  A querulous mutter, or a quick gay laugh,
  Never a senseless gust now man is born. 
  The herded pines commune and have deep thoughts,
  A secret they assemble to discuss
  When the sun drops behind their trunks.

* * * * *

“The morn has enterprise, deep quiet droops
With evening, triumph takes the sunset hour,
Voluptuous transport ripens with the corn
Beneath a warm moon like a happy face."[A]

[Footnote A:  Paracelsus.]

Such is the transmuting power of imagination, that there is “nothing but doth suffer change into something rich and strange”; and yet the imagination, when loyal to itself, only sees more deeply into the truth of things, and gets a closer and fuller hold of facts.

But, although the human mind thus heals the breach between nature and spirit, and discovers the latter in the former, still it is not in this way that Browning finally establishes his idealism.  For him, the principle working in all things is not reason, but love.  It is from love that all being first flowed; into it all returns through man; and in all “the wide compass which is fetched,” through the infinite