of human character.  Love, he thinks, is never illicit, never unwise, except when it is disloyal to itself; it never ruins, but always strives to enrich its object.  Bacon quotes with approval a saying “That it is impossible to love, and to be wise.”  Browning asserts that it is impossible to love and not be wise.  It is a power that, according to the Christian idea which the poet adopts, has infinite goodness for its source, and that, even in its meanest expression, is always feeling its way back to its origin, flowing again into the ocean whence it came.

So sparklingly pure is this passion that it could exorcise the evil and turn old to new, even in the case of Leonce Miranda.  At least Browning, in this poem, strives to show that, being true love, though the love of an unclean man for an unclean woman, it was a power at war with the sordid elements of that sordid life.  Love has always the same potency, flame is always flame,

      “no matter whence flame sprung,
  From gums and spice, or else from straw and rottenness."[A]

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

      “Let her but love you,
  All else you disregard! what else can be? 
  You know how love is incompatible
  With falsehood—­purifies, assimilates
  All other passions to itself."[B]

[Footnote B:  Colombe’s Birthday.]

  “Ne’er wrong yourself so far as quote the world
  And say, love can go unrequited here! 
  You will have blessed him to his whole life’s end—­
  Low passions hindered, baser cares kept back,
  All goodness cherished where you dwelt—­and dwell."[C]

[Footnote C:  Ibid.]

But, while love is always a power lifting a man upwards to the level of its own origin from whatever depths of degradation, its greatest potency can reveal itself only in characters intrinsically pure, such as Pompilia and Caponsacchi.  Like mercy and every other spiritual gift, it is mightiest in the mighty.  In the good and great of the earth love is veritably seen to be God’s own energy;

    “Who never is dishonoured in the spark
  He gave us from His fire of fires, and bade
  Remember whence it sprang, nor be afraid
      While that burns on, though all the rest grow dark."[A]

[Footnote A:  Any Wife to Any Husband, III.]

It were almost an endless task to recount the ways in which Browning exhibits the moralizing power of love:  how it is for him the quintessence of all goodness; the motive, and inspiring cause, of every act in the world that is completely right; and how, on that account, it is the actual working in the man of the ideal of all perfection.  This doctrine of love is, in my opinion, the richest vein of pure ore in Browning’s poetry.