Since love has such an important place in Browning’s theory of life, it is necessary to see what he means by it.  For love has had for different individuals, ages and nations, a very different significance; and almost every great poet has given it a different interpretation.  And this is not unnatural.  For love is a passion which, beginning with youth and the hey-day of the blood, expands with the expanding life, and takes new forms of beauty and goodness at every stage.  And this is equally true, whether we speak of the individual or of the human race.

Love is no accident in man’s history, nor a passing emotion.  It is rather a constitutive element of man’s nature, fundamental and necessary as his intelligence.  And, like everything native and constitutive, it is obedient to the law of evolution, which is the law of man’s being; and it passes, therefore, through ever varying forms.  To it—­if we may for the moment make a distinction between the theoretical and practical life, or between ideas and their causative potency—­must be attributed the constructive power which has built the world of morality, with its intangible but most real relations which bind man to man and age to age.  It is the author of the organic institutions which, standing between the individual and the rudeness of nature, awaken in him the need, and give him the desire and the faculty, of attaining higher things than physical satisfaction.  Man is meant to act as well as to think, to be virtuous as well as to have knowledge.  It is possible that reverence for the intellect may have led men, at times, to attribute the evolution of the race too exclusively to the theoretic consciousness, forgetting that, along with reason, there co-operates a twin power in all that is wisest and best in us, and that a heart which can love, is as essential a pre-condition of all worthy attainment, as an intellect which can see.  Love and reason[A] are equally primal powers in man, and they reflect might into each other:  for love increases knowledge, and knowledge love.  It is their combined power that gives interest and meaning to the facts of life, and transmutes them into a moral and intellectual order.  They, together, are lifting man out of the isolation and chaos of subjectivity into membership in a spiritual kingdom, where collision and exclusion are impossible, and all are at once kings and subjects.

[Footnote A:  It would be more correct to say the reason that is loving or the love that is rational; for, though there is distinction, there is no dualism.]

And, just as reason is present as a transmuting power in the sensational life of the infancy of the individual and race, so is love present amidst the confused and chaotic activity of the life that knows no law other than its own changing emotions.  Both make for order, and both grow with it.  Both love and reason have travelled a long way in the history of man.  The patriot’s passion for his country, the enthusiasm