“See the sage, with the hunger for the truth,
  And see his system that’s all true, except
  The one weak place, that’s stanchioned by a lie!"[A]

[Footnote A:  Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.]

It may be that the religious form, through which he generally reaches his convictions, is not freed from a dogmatic element, which so penetrates his thought as to vitiate it as a philosophy.  Nevertheless, it answered for the poet all the uses of a philosophy, and it may do the same for many who are distrustful of the systems of the schools, and who are “neither able to find a faith nor to do without one.”  It contains far-reaching hints of a reconciliation of the elements of discord in our lives, and a suggestion of a way in which it may be demonstrated, that an optimistic theory is truer to facts than any scepticism or agnosticism, with the despair that they necessarily bring.

For Browning not only advanced a principle, whereby, as he conceived, man might again be reconciled to the world and God, and all things be viewed as the manifestation of a power that is benevolent; he also sought to apply his principle to the facts of life.  He illustrates his fundamental hypothesis by means of these facts; and he tests its validity with the persistence and impressive candour of a scientific investigator.  His optimism is not that of an eclectic, who can ignore inconvenient difficulties.  It is not an attempt to justify the whole by neglecting details, or to make wrong seem right by reference to a far-off result, in which the steps of the process are forgotten.  He stakes the value of his view of life on its power to meet all facts; one fact, ultimately irreconcilable with his hypothesis, will, he knows, destroy it.

                     “All the same,
  Of absolute and irretrievable black,—­black’s soul of black
  Beyond white’s power to disintensify,—­
  Of that I saw no sample:  such may wreck
  My life and ruin my philosophy
  Tomorrow, doubtless."[A]

[Footnote A:  A Bean Stripe—­Ferishtah’s Fancies.]

He knew that, to justify God, he had to justify all His ways to man; that if the good rules at all, it rules absolutely; and that a single exception would confute his optimism.

  “So, gazing up, in my youth, at love
  As seen through power, ever above
  All modes which make it manifest,
  My soul brought all to a single test—­
  That He, the Eternal First and Last,
  Who, in His power, had so surpassed
  All man conceives of what is might,—­
  Whose wisdom, too, showed infinite,
  —­Would prove as infinitely good;
  Would never, (my soul understood,)
  With power to work all love desires,
  Bestow e’en less than man requires."[B]

[Footnote B:  Christmas Eve.]

  “No:  love which, on earth, amid all the shows of it,
  Has ever been seen the sole good of life in it,
  The love, ever growing there, spite of the strife in it,
  Shall arise, made perfect, from death’s repose of it. 
  And I shall behold Thee, face to face,
  O God, and in Thy light retrace
  How in all I loved here, still wast Thou!"[C]