Thus Browning regards love as an omnipresent good.  There is nothing, he tells us in Fifine, which cannot reflect it; even moral putridity becomes phosphorescent, “and sparks from heaven transpierce earth’s coarsest covertures.”

  “There is no good of life but love—­but love! 
  What else looks good, is some shade flung from love,
  Love gilds it, gives it worth."[B]

[Footnote B:  In a balcony.]

There is no fact which, if seen to the heart, will not prove itself to have love for its purpose, and, therefore, for its substance.  And it is on this account that everything finds its place in a kosmos and that there is

  “No detail but, in place allotted it, was prime
  And perfect."[A]

[Footnote A:  Fifine at the Fair. xxxi.]

Every event in the history of the world and of man is explicable, as the bursting into new form of this elemental, all-pervading power.  The permanence in change of nature, the unity in variety, the strength which clothes itself in beauty, are all manifestations of love.  Nature is not merely natural; matter and life’s minute beginnings, are more than they seem.  Paracelsus said that he knew and felt

                 “What God is, what we are,
  What life is—­how God tastes an infinite joy
  In finite ways—­one everlasting bliss,
  From whom all being emanates, all power
  Proceeds:  in whom is life for evermore,
  Yet whom existence in its lowest form
  Includes."[B]

[Footnote B:  Paracelsus.]

The scheme of love does not begin with man, he is rather its consummation.

  “Whose attributes had here and there
  Been scattered o’er the visible world before,
  Asking to be combined, dim fragments meant
  To be united in some wondrous whole,
  Imperfect qualities throughout creation,
  Suggesting some one creature yet to make,
  Some point where all those scattered rays should meet
  Convergent in the faculties of man.

* * * * *

  “Hints and previsions of which faculties,
  Are strewn confusedly everywhere about
  The inferior natures, and all lead up higher,
  All shape out divinely the superior race,
  The heir of hopes too fair to turn out false,
  And man appears at last."[A]

[Footnote A:  Paracelsus.]

Power, knowledge, love, all these are found in the world, in which

            “All tended to mankind,
  And, man produced, all has its end thus far: 
  But, in completed man begins anew
  A tendency to God."[B]

[Footnote B:  Ibid.]

For man, being intelligent, flings back his light on all that went before,

“Illustrates all the inferior grades, explains
Each back step in the circle."[C]

[Footnote C:  Ibid. 189.]

He gives voice to the mute significance of Nature, and lets in the light on its blind groping.