[Footnote 141:  Colombe’s Birthday.]

And the glimmer of soul that lurked in the veriest act of humanity the breath of love could quicken into pervading fire.[142] Love was only the most intense and potent of those sudden accesses of vitality which are wont, in Browning, suddenly to break like a flame from the straw and dross of a brutish or sophisticated consciousness, confounding foresight and calculation, but giving endless stimulus to hope.  Even in the contact with sin and sorrow Browning saw simply the touch of Earth from which Love, like Antaeus, sprang into fuller being; they were the “dread machinery” devised to evolve man’s moral qualities, “to make him love in turn and be beloved."[143]

[Footnote 142:  Fifine.]

[Footnote 143:  The Pope.]

But with all its insurgent emancipating vehemence Love was for Browning, also, the very ground of stable and harmonious existence, “the energy of integration,” as Myers has finely said, “which makes a cosmos of the sum of things,” the element of permanence, of law.  True, its harmony was of the kind which admits discord and eschews routine; its law that which is of eternity and not of yesterday; its stability that which is only assured and fortified by the chivalry that plucks a Pompilia, or an Alcestis, from their legal doom.  The true anarchist, as he sometimes dared to hint, was the cold unreason of duty which, as in Bifurcation, keeps lovers meant for each other apart.  It is by love that the soul solves the problem—­so tragically insoluble to poor Sordello—­of “fitting to the finite its infinity,” and satisfying the needs of Time and Eternity at once;[144] for Love, belonging equally to both spheres, can bring the purposes of body and soul into complete accord: 

     “Like yonder breadth of watery heaven, a bay
      And that sky-space of water, ray for ray
      And star for star, one richness where they mixed,
      As this and that wing of an angel, fixed
      Tumultuary splendours.”

[Footnote 144:  Sordello, sub fin.]

In a life thus thrilled into harmony heaven was already realised on earth; and Eternity itself could but continue what Time had begun.  Death, for such a soul, was not an awaking, for it had not slept; nor an emancipation, for it was already free; nor a satisfying of desire, for the essence of Love was to want; it was only a point at which the “last ride together” might pass into an eternal “riding on”—­

     “With life for ever old, yet new,
      Changed not in kind but in degree,
      The instant made Eternity,—­
      And Heaven just prove that I and she
      Ride, ride together, for ever ride!”

VI.