“Why is it I dare
  Think but lightly of such impuissance?  What stops my despair? 
  This;—­’tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do."[B]

[Footnote B:  Saul.]

The fact that “his wishes fall through,” that he cannot, although willing, help Saul, “grow poor to enrich him, fill up his life by starving his own,” does not prevent him from regarding his “service as perfect.”  The will was there, although it lacked power to effect itself.  The moral worth of an action is complete, if it is willed; and it is nowise affected by its outer consequences, as both Browning and Kant teach.  The loving will, the inner act of loving, though it can bear no outward fruit, being debarred by outward impediment, is still a complete and highest good.

  “But Love is victory, the prize itself: 
  Love—­trust to!  Be rewarded for the trust
  In trust’s mere act.  In love success is sure,
  Attainment—­no delusion, whatso’er
  The prize be:  apprehended as a prize,
  A prize it is."[A]

[Footnote A:  A Pillar at Sebzevar.]

Whatever the evil in the world and the impotence of man, his duty and his dignity in willing to perform it, are ever the same.  Though God neglect the world

            “Man’s part
  Is plain—­to send love forth,—­astray, perhaps: 
  No matter, he has done his part."[B]

[Footnote B:  The Sun.]

Now, this fact of inner experience, which the poet thinks incontrovertible—­the fact that man, every man, necessarily regards evil, whether natural or moral, as something to be annulled, were it only possible—­is an immediate proof of the indwelling of that which is highest in man.  On this basis, Browning is able to re-establish the optimism which, from the side of knowledge, he had utterly abandoned.

The very fact that the world is condemned by man is proof that there dwells in man something better than the world, whose evidence the pessimist himself cannot escape.  All is not wrong, as long as wrong seems wrong.  The pessimist, in condemning the world, must except himself.  In his very charge against God of having made man in His anger, there lies a contradiction; for he himself fronts and defies the outrage.  There is no depth of despair which this good cannot illumine with joyous light, for the despair is itself the reflex of the good.

“Were earth and all it holds illusions mere,
Only a machine for teaching love and hate, and hope and fear,

“If this life’s conception new life fail to realize—­
Though earth burst and proved a bubble glassing hues of hell, one huge
Reflex of the devil’s doings—­God’s work by no subterfuge,"[A]

[Footnote A:  La Saisiaz.]

still, good is good, and love is its own exceeding great reward.  Alone, in a world abandoned to chaos and infinite night, man is still not without God, if he loves.  In virtue of his love, he himself would be crowned as God, as the poet often argues, were there no higher love elsewhere.