We are for ever kept from the fact which is supposed to be given; our intellects play about it; sense and even intellect itself are interposing media, which we must use, and yet, in using them, we only fool ourselves with semblances.  The poet has now grown so cautious that he will not declare his own knowledge to be valid for any other man.  David Hume could scarcely be more suspicious of the human intellect; nor Berkeley more surely persuaded of the purely subjective nature of its attainments.  In fact, the latter relied on human knowledge in a way impossible to Browning, for he regarded it as the language of spirit speaking to spirit.  Out of his experience, Browning says,

                            “There crowds conjecture manifold. 
  But, as knowledge, this comes only,—­things may be as I behold
  Or may not be, but, without me and above me, things there are;
  I myself am what I know not—­ignorance which proves no bar
  To the knowledge that I am, and, since I am, can recognize
  What to me is pain and pleasure:  this is sure, the rest—­surmise."[A]

[Footnote A:  La Saisiaz.]

Thought itself, for aught he knows, may be afflicted with a kind of colour-blindness; and he knows no appeal when one affirms “green as grass,” and another contradicts him with “red as grass.”  Under such circumstances, it is not strange that Browning should decline to speak except for himself, and that he will

  “Nowise dare to play the spokesman for my brothers strong or weak,”

or that he will far less presume to pronounce for God, and pretend that the truth finds utterance from lips of clay—­

  “Pass off human lisp as echo of the sphere-song out of reach.”

  “Have I knowledge?  Confounded it shrivels at Wisdom laid bare! 
  Have I forethought? how purblind, how blank, to the Infinite Care!

* * * * *

  “And thus looking within and around me, I ever renew
  (With that stoop of the soul, which in bending upraises it too)
  The submission of man’s nothing-perfect to God’s all-complete,
  As by each new obeisance in spirit, I climb to His feet."[B]

[Footnote B:  Saul, III.]

But David finds in himself one faculty so supreme in worth that he keeps it in abeyance—­

  “Lest, insisting to claim and parade in it, wot ye, I worst
  E’en the Giver in one gift.—­Behold, I could love if I durst! 
  But I sink the pretension as fearing a man may o’ertake
  God’s own speed in the one way of love:  I abstain for love’s sake."[A]

[Footnote A:  Saul, III.]

This faculty of love, so far from being tainted with finitude, like knowledge; so far from being mere man’s, or a temporary and deceptive power given to man for temporary uses, by a Creator who has another ineffably higher way of loving, as He has of truth, is itself divine.  In contrast with the activity of love, Omnipotence itself dwindles into insignificance, and creation sinks into a puny exercise of power.  Love, in a word, is the highest good; and, as such, it has all its worth in itself, and gives to all other things what worth they have.  God Himself gains the “ineffable crown” by showing love and saving the weak.  It is the power divine, the central energy of God’s being.