No intellectual formula, no phrase, no word, can express the whole purport of those intense and intimate fusions of sensation, passion, and thought which we call poetic intuition, and which all strictly poetic “philosophy” or “criticism of life” is an attempt to interpret and articulate.  Browning was master of more potent weapons of the strictly intellectual kind than many poets of his rank, and his work is charged with convictions which bear upon philosophic problems and involve philosophic ideas.  But they were neither systematic deductions from a speculative first principle nor fragments of tradition eclectically pieced together; by their very ambiguity and Protean many-sidedness they betrayed that, however tinged they might be on the surface with speculative or traditional phrases, the nourishing roots sprang from the heart of joyous vitality in a primitive and original temperament.  In Browning, if in any man, Joy sang that “strong music of the soul” which re-creates all the vitalities of the world, and endows us with “a new Earth and a new Heaven.”  And if joy was the root of Browning’s intuition, and life “in widest commonalty spread” the element in which it moved, Love, the most intimate, intense, and marvellous of all vital energies, was the ideal centre towards which it converged.  In Love, as Browning understood it, all those elementary joys of his found satisfaction.  There he saw the flawless purity which rejoiced him in Pompilia’s soul, which “would not take pollution, ermine-like armed from dishonour by its own soft snow.”  There he saw sudden incalculableness of power abruptly shattering the continuities of routine, throwing life instantly into a new perspective, and making barren trunks break into sudden luxuriance like the palm; or, again, intimately interpenetrating soul with soul,—­“one near one is too far”; or entangling the whole creation in the inextricable embrace of God.

But if all his instincts and imaginative proclivities found their ideal in Love, they also insensibly impressed their own character upon his conception of it.  The “Love” which has so deep a significance for Browning is a Love steeped in the original complexion of his mind, and bearing the impress of the singular position which he occupies in the welter of nineteenth-century intellectual history.  His was one of the rare natures in which revolutionary liberalism and spiritual reaction, encountering in nearly equal strength, seem to have divided their principles and united their forces.  Psychologically, the one had its strongest root in the temper which reasons, and values ideas; the other in that which feels, and values emotions.  Sociologically, the one stood for individualism, the other for solidarity.  In their ultimate presuppositions, the one inclined to the standpoint of the senses and experience; the other to a mostly vague and implicit idealism.  In their political ideals, the one strove for progress, and for freedom as its condition; the other for order, and for active legal intervention as its safeguard.