But it remains to follow briefly our poet’s treatment of love in another direction—­as a principle present, not only in God as creative and redeeming Power, and in man as the highest motive and energy of the moral life, but also in the outer world, in the “material” universe.  In the view of the poet, the whole creation is nothing but love incarnate, a pulsation from the divine heart.  Love is the source of all law and of all beauty.  “Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night speaketh knowledge.  There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard.”  And our poet speaks as if he had caught the meaning of the language, and believes that all things speak of love—­the love of God.

“I think,” says the heroine of the Inn Album,

“Womanliness means only motherhood;
All love begins and ends there,—­roams enough,
But, having run the circle, rests at home."[A]

[Footnote A:  The Inn Album.]

And Browning detects something of this motherhood everywhere.  He finds it as

                          “Some cause
  Such as is put into a tree, which turns
  Away from the north wind with what nest it holds."[B]

[Footnote B:  The Ring and the Book—­Canon Caponsacchi, 1374-1376.]

The Pope—­who, if any one, speaks for Browning—­declares that

    “Brute and bird, reptile and the fly,

Ay and, I nothing doubt, even tree, shrub, plant
And flower o’ the field, are all in a common pact
To worthily defend the trust of trusts,
Life from the Ever Living."[C]

[Footnote C:  The Ring and the Book—­The Pope, 1076-1081.]

“Because of motherhood,” said the minor pope in Ivan Ivanovitch,

                                  “each male
  Yields to his partner place, sinks proudly in the scale: 
  His strength owned weakness, wit—­folly, and courage—­fear,
  Beside the female proved males’s mistress—­only here
  The fox-dam, hunger-pined, will slay the felon sire
  Who dares assault her whelp.”

The betrayal of the mother’s trust is the “unexampled sin,” which scares the world and shames God.

“I hold that, failing human sense,
The very earth had oped, sky fallen, to efface
Humanity’s new wrong, motherhood’s first disgrace."[A]

[Footnote A:  Ivan Ivanovitch.]

This instinct of love, which binds brute-parent to brute-offspring, is a kind of spiritual law in the natural world:  it, like all law, guarantees the continuity and unity of the world, and it is scarcely akin to merely physical attraction.  No doubt its basis is physical; it has an organism of flesh and blood for its vehicle and instrument:  but mathematical physics cannot explain it, nor can it be detected by chemical tests.  Rather, with the poet, we are to regard brute affection as a kind of rude outline of human love; as a law in nature, which, when understood by man and adopted as his rule of conduct, becomes the essence and potency of his moral life.