“I felt quite sure that God had set
  Himself to Satan; who would spend
  A minute’s mistrust on the end?"[B]

[Footnote B:_Count Gismond_.]

It is the same respect for strenuous action and dislike of compromise, that inspired the pathetic lines in which he condemns the Lost Leader, who broke “From the van and the free-men, and sunk to the rear and the slaves.”  For the good pursues its work without him.

  “We shall march prospering,—­not thro’ his presence;
    Songs may inspirit us,—­not from his lyre;
  Deeds will be done,—­while he boasts his quiescence,
    Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire: 
  Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more,
    One task more declined, one more footpath untrod,
  One more devil’s triumph and sorrow for angels,
    One wrong more to man, one more insult to God!"[A]

[Footnote A:  The List Leader.]

Everywhere Browning’s ethical teaching has this characteristic feature of vigorous decisiveness.  As Dr. Westcott has said, “No room is left for indifference or neutrality.  There is no surrender to an idle optimism.  A part must be taken and maintained.  The spirit in which Luther said ‘Pecca fortiter’ finds in him powerful expression.”  Browning is emphatically the poet-militant, and the prophet of struggling manhood.  His words are like trumpet-calls sounded in the van of man’s struggle, wafted back by the winds, and heard through all the din of conflict by his meaner brethren, who are obscurely fighting for the good in the throng and crush of life.  We catch the tones of this heart-strengthening music in the earliest poems he sung:  nor did his courage fail, or vigour wane, as the shades of night gathered round him.  In the latest of all his poems, he still speaks of

  “One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
    Never doubted clouds would break,
  Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
    Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
      Sleep to wake.”

  “No, at noon-day in the bustle of man’s work-time
    Greet the unseen with a cheer! 
  Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be,
    ‘Strive and thrive’! cry ’Speed!—­fight on, fare ever
      There as here.’"[A]

[Footnote A:  Epilogue to Asolande.]

These are fit words to close such a life.  His last act is a kind of re-enlistment in the service of the good; the joyous venturing forth on a new war under new conditions and in lands unknown, by a heroic man who is sure of himself and sure of his cause.

But now comes the great difficulty.  How can the poet combine such earnestness in the moral struggle with so deep a conviction of the ultimate nothingness of evil, and of the complete victory of the good?  Again and again we have found him pronounce such victory to be absolutely necessary and inevitable.  His belief in God, his trust in His love and might, will brook no limit anywhere.  His conviction is that the power of the good subjects evil itself to its authority.