[Footnote 26:  “Browning’s ‘orthodoxy’ brought him into many a combat with his rationalistic friends, some of whom could hardly believe that he took his doctrine seriously.  Such was the fact, however; indeed, I have heard that he once stopped near an open-air assembly which an atheist was haranguing, and, in the freedom of his incognito, gave strenuous battle to the opinions uttered.  To one who had spoken of an expected ‘Judgment Day’ as a superstition, I heard him say:  ’I don’t see that.  Why should there not be a settling day in the universe, as when a master settles with his workmen at the end of the week?’ There was something in his tone and manner which suggested his dramatic conception of religious ideas and ideals.”—­MONCURE D. CONWAY.]

“How should externals satisfy my soul?” was his cry in “Sordello,” and it was the fundamental strain of all his poetry, as the fundamental motive is expressible in

     “—­a loving worm within its sod
      Were diviner than a loveless god
      Amid his worlds”—­

love being with him the golden key wherewith to unlock the world of the universe, of the soul, of all nature.  He is as convinced of the two absolute facts of God and Soul as Cardinal Newman in writing of “Two and two only, supreme and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator.”  Most fervently he believes that

     “Haply for us the ideal dawn shall break ... 
      And set our pulse in tune with moods divine”—­

though, co-equally, in the necessity of “making man sole sponsor of himself.”  Ever and again, of course, he was betrayed by the bewildering and defiant puzzle of life:  seeing in the face of the child the seed of sorrow, “in the green tree an ambushed flame, in Phosphor a vaunt-guard of Night.”  Yet never of him could be written that thrilling saying which Sainte-Beuve uttered of Pascal, “That lost traveller who yearns for home, who, strayed without a guide in a dark forest, takes many times the wrong road, goes, returns upon his steps, is discouraged, sits down at a crossing of the roads, utters cries to which no one responds, resumes his march with frenzy and pain, throws himself upon the ground and wants to die, and reaches home at last only after all sorts of anxieties and after sweating blood.”  No darkness, no tempest, no gloom, long confused his vision of ‘the ideal dawn.’  As the carrier-dove is often baffled, yet ere long surely finds her way through smoke and fog and din to her far country home, so he too, however distraught, soon or late soared to untroubled ether.  He had that profound inquietude, which the great French critic says ’attests a moral nature of a high rank, and a mental nature stamped with the seal of the archangel.’  But, unlike Pascal—­who in Sainte-Beuve’s words exposes in the human mind itself two abysses, “on one side an elevation toward God, toward the morally beautiful, a return movement toward an illustrious origin, and on the other side an abasement in the direction of evil”—­Browning sees, believes in, holds to nothing short of the return movement, for one and all, toward an illustrious origin.