Browning nowhere shows his native strength more clearly than in his treatment of love.  He has touched this world-old theme—­which almost every poet has handled, and handled in his highest manner—­with that freshness and insight, which is possible only to the inborn originality of genius.  Other poets have, in some ways, given to love a more exquisite utterance, and rendered its sweetness, and tenderness, and charm with a lighter grace.  It may even be admitted that there are poets whose verses have echoed more faithfully the fervour and intoxication of passion, and who have shown greater power of interpreting it in the light of a mystic idealism.  But, in one thing, Browning stands alone.  He has given to love a moral significance, a place and power amongst those substantial elements on which rest the dignity of man’s being and the greatness of his destiny, in a way which is, I believe, without example in any other poet.  And he has done this by means of that moral and religious earnestness, which pervades all his poetry.  The one object of supreme interest to him is the development of the soul, and his penetrative insight revealed to him the power to love as the paramount fact in that development.  To love, he repeatedly tells us, is the sole and supreme object of man’s life; it is the one lesson which he has to learn on earth; and, love once learnt, in what way matters little, “it leaves completion in the soul.”  Love we dare not, and, indeed, cannot absolutely miss.  No man can be absolutely selfish and be man.

“Beneath the veriest ash, there hides a spark of soul
Which, quickened by love’s breath, may yet pervade the whole
O’ the grey, and, free again, be fire; of worth the same,
Howe’er produced, for, great or little, flame is flame."[A]

[Footnote A:  Fifine at the Fair, xliii.]

Love, once evoked, once admitted into the soul,

                          “adds worth to worth,
  As wine enriches blood, and straightway sends it forth,
  Conquering and to conquer, through all eternity,
  That’s battle without end."[B]

[Footnote B:  Ibid. liv.]

This view of the significance of love grew on Browning as his knowledge of man’s nature and destiny became fuller and deeper, while, at the same time, his trust in the intellect became less.  Even in Paracelsus he reveals love, not as a sentiment or intoxicating passion, as one might expect from a youthful poet, but as one of the great fundamental “faculties” of man.  Love, “blind, oft-failing, half-enlightened, often-chequered trust,” though it be, still makes man

  “The heir of hopes too fair to turn out false.”

In that poem, love is definitely lifted by the poet to the level of knowledge.  Intellectual gain, apart from love, is folly and futility, worthless for the individual and worthless to the race.  “Mind is nothing but disease,” Paracelsus cries in the bitterness of his disappointment, “and natural health is ignorance”; and he asks of the mad poet who “loved too rashly,”