only “in the stream of the world.”  With him the friction of active life, and especially the experience of human love, are necessary to realise the Divine in man.  Quite in the spirit of St. John he asks, “How can that course be safe, which from the first produces carelessness to human love?” “Do not cut yourself from human weal ... there are strange punishments for such” as do so.[393] Solitude is the death of all but the strongest virtue, and in Browning’s view it also deprives us of the strongest inner witness to the existence of a loving Father in heaven.  For he who “finds love full in his nature” cannot doubt that in this, as in all else, the Creator must far surpass the creature.[394] Since, then, in knowing love we learn to know God, and since the object of life is to know God (this, the mystic’s minor premiss, is taken for granted by Browning), it follows that love is the meaning of life; and he who finds it not “loses what he lived for, and eternally must lose it.[395]” “The mightiness of love is curled” inextricably round all power and beauty in the world.  The worst fate that can befall us is to lead “a ghastly smooth life, dead at heart.[396]” Especially interesting is the passage where he chooses or chances upon Eckhart’s image of the “spark” in the centre of the soul, and gives it a new turn in accordance with his own Mysticism—­

  “It would not be because my eye grew dim
   Thou could’st not find the love there, thanks to Him
   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.[397]”

Our language has no separate words to distinguish Christian love ([Greek:  agape]—­caritas) from sexual love ([Greek:  eros]—­amor); “charity” has not established itself in its wider meaning.  Perhaps this is not to be regretted—­at any rate Browning’s poems could hardly be translated into any language in which this distinction exists.  But let us not forget that the ascetic element is as strong in Browning as in Wordsworth.  Love, he seems to indicate, is no exception to the rule that our joys may be “three parts pain,” for “where pain ends gain ends too.[398]”

              “Not yet on thee
  Shall burst the future, as successive zones
  Of several wonder open on some spirit
  Flying secure and glad from heaven to heaven;
  But thou shalt painfully attain to joy,
  While hope and fear and love shall keep thee man.[399]”

He even carries this law into the future life, and will have none of a “joy which is crystallised for ever.”  Felt imperfection is a proof of a higher birthright:[400] if we have arrived at the completion of our nature as men, then “begins anew a tendency to God.”  This faith in unending progress as the law of life is very characteristic of our own age.[401] It assumes a questionable shape sometimes; but Browning’s trust in real success through apparent disappointments—­a trust even based on the consciousness of present failure—­is certainly one of the noblest parts of his religious philosophy.