Browning never forgets this moral or religious quality of love.  So pure is this emotion to the poet, “so perfect in whiteness, that it will not take pollution; but, ermine-like, is armed from dishonour by its own soft snow.”  In the corruptest hearts, amidst the worst sensuality, love is still a power divine, making for all goodness.  Even when it is kindled into flame by an illicit touch, and wars against the life of the family, which is its own product, its worth is supreme.  He who has learned to love in any way, has “caught God’s secret.”  How he has caught it, whom he loves, whether or not he is loved in return, all these things matter little.  The paramount question on which hangs man’s fate is, has he learned to love another, any other, Fifine or Elvire.  “She has lost me,” said the unloved lover; “I have gained her.  Her soul’s mine.”

The supreme worth of love, the mere emotion itself, however called into activity, secures it against all taint.  No one who understands Browning in the least, can accuse him of touching with a rash hand the sanctity of the family; rather he places it on the basis of its own principle, and thereby makes for it the strongest defence.  Such love as he speaks of, however irregular its manifestation or sensuous its setting, can never be confounded with lust—­“hell’s own blue tint.”  It is further removed from lust even than asceticism.  It has not even a negative attitude towards the flesh; but finds the flesh to be “stuff for transmuting,” and reduces it to the uses of the spirit.  The love which is sung by Browning is more pure and free, and is set in a higher altitude than anything that can be reached by the way of negation.  It is a consecration of the undivided self, so that “soul helps not flesh more, than flesh helps soul.”  It is not only a spiritual and divine emotion, but it also “shows a heart within blood-tinctured with a veined humanity.”

  “Be a God and hold me
    With a charm! 
  Be a man and hold me
    With thine arm!

  “Teach me, only teach, Love! 
    As I ought
  I will speak thy speech, Love! 
    Think thy thought—­

  “Meet, if thou require it,
    Both demands,
  Laying flesh and spirit
    In thy hands."[A]

[Footnote A:  A Woman’s Last Word.]

True love is always an infinite giving, which holds nothing back.  It is a spendthrift, magnificent in its recklessness, squandering the very essence of the self upon its object, and by doing so, in the end enriching the self beyond all counting.  For in loving, the individual becomes re-impersonated in another; the distinction of Me and Thee is swept away, and there pulses in two individuals one warm life.

  “If two lives join, there is oft a scar
    They are one and one with a shadowy third;
  One near one is too far.

  “A moment after, and hands unseen
    Were hanging the night around us fast;
  But we knew that a bar was broken between
    Life and life:  we were mixed at last
  In spite of the mortal screen."[B]