Nowhere in Browning, unless we except Paracelsus, is there any sign of an inclination to treat man’s knowledge in the same spirit as he deals with man’s love—­namely, as a direct emanation from the inmost nature of God, a divine element that completes and crowns man’s life on earth.  On the contrary, he shows a persistent tendency to treat love as a power higher in nature than reason, and to give to it a supreme place in the formation of character; and, as he grows older, that tendency grows in strength.  The philosophical poems, in which love is made all in all, and knowledge is reduced to nescience follow by logical evolution from principles, the influence of which we can detect even in his earlier works.  Still, in the latter, these principles are only latent, and are far from holding undisputed sway.  Browning was, at first, restrained from exclusive devotion to abstract views, by the suggestions which the artistic spirit receives through its immediate contact with the facts of life.  That contact it is very difficult for philosophy to maintain as it pursues its effort after universal truth.  Philosophy is obliged to analyze in order to define, and, in that process, it is apt to lose something of that completeness of representation, which belongs to art.  For art is always engaged in presenting the universal in the form of a particular object of beauty.  Its product is a “known unknown,” but the unknown is the unexhausted reality of a fact of intuition.  Nor can analysis ever exhaust it; theory can never catch up art, or explain all that is in it.  On similar grounds, it may be shown that it is impossible for reason to lay bare all the elements that enter into its first complex product, which we call faith.  In religion, as in art, man is aware of more than he knows; his articulate logic cannot do justice to all the truths of the “heart.”  “The supplementary reflux of light” of philosophy cannot “illustrate all the inferior grades” of knowledge.  Man will never completely understand himself.

  “I knew, I felt, (perception unexpressed,
  Uncomprehended by our narrow thought,
  But somehow felt and known in every shift
  And change in the spirit,—­nay, in every pore
  Of the body, even,)—­what God is, what we are,
  What life is—­how God tastes an infinite joy
  In infinite ways—­one everlasting bliss,
  From whom all being emanates, all power
  Proceeds."[A]

[Footnote A:  Paracelsus.]

I believe that it is possible, by the help of the intuitions of Browning’s highest artistic period, to bring together again the elements of his broken faith, and to find in them suggestions of a truer philosophy of life than anything which the poet himself achieved.  Perhaps, indeed, it is not easy, nor altogether fair, to press the passionate utterances of his religious rapture into the service of metaphysics, and to treat the unmeasured language of emotion as the expression of a definite doctrine.  Nevertheless, rather than set forth a new defence of the faith, which his agnosticism left exposed to the assaults of doubt and denial, it is better to make Browning correct his own errors, and to appeal from the metaphysician to the poet, from the sobriety of the logical understanding to the inspiration of poetry.