* * * * *

  “Would I suffer for him that I love?  So would’st Thou,—­so wilt Thou! 
  So shall crown Thee, the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost crown—­
  And Thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up nor down
  One spot for the creature to stand in!"[A]

[Footnote A:  Saul.]

And this same love not only constitutes the nature of God and the moral ideal of man, but it is also the purpose and essence of all created being, both animate and inanimate.

                          “This world’s no blot for us,
  Nor blank; it means intensely and means good."[B]

[Footnote B:  Fra Lippo Lippi.]

“O world, as God has made it!  All is beauty: 
And knowing this is love, and love is duty,
What further may be sought for or declared?”

In this world then “all’s love, yet all’s law.”  God permits nothing to break through its universal sway, even the very wickedness and misery of life are brought into the scheme of good, and, when rightly understood, reveal themselves as its means.

  “I can believe this dread machinery
  Of sin and sorrow, would confound me else,
  Devised—­all pain, at most expenditure
  Of pain by Who devised pain—­to evolve,
  By new machinery in counterpart,
  The moral qualities of man—­how else?—­
  To make him love in turn and be beloved,
  Creative and self-sacrificing too,
  And thus eventually Godlike."[C]

[Footnote C:  The Ring and the Book—­The Pope, 1375-1383.]

The poet thus brings the natural world, the history of man, and the nature of God, within the limits of the same conception.  The idea of love solves for Browning all the enigmas of human life and thought.

          “The thing that seems
  Mere misery, under human schemes,
  Becomes, regarded by the light
  Of love, as very near, or quite
  As good a gift as joy before."[A]

[Footnote A:  Easter Day.]

Taking Browning’s work as a whole, it is scarcely possible to deny that this is at once the supreme motive of his art, and the principle on which his moral and religious doctrine rests.  He is always strong and convincing when he is dealing with this theme.  It was evidently his own deepest conviction, and it gave him the courage to face the evils of the world, and the power as an artist to “contrive his music from its moans.”  It plays, in his philosophy of life, the part that Reason fills for Hegel, or the Blind Will for Schopenhauer; and he is as fearless as they are in reducing all phenomena into forms of the activity of his first principle.  Love not only gave him firm footing amid the wash and welter of the present world, where time spins fast, life fleets, and all is change, but it made him look forward with joy to “the immortal course”; for, to him, all the universe is love-woven.  All life is but treading the “love-way,” and no wanderer can finally lose it.  “The way-faring men, though fools, shall not err therein.”