In two of these four points of contrast, Browning’s temperament ranged him more or less decisively on the Liberal side.  Individualist to the core, he was conspicuously deficient in the kind of social mind which makes a poet the voice of an organised community, a nation, or a class.  Progress, again, was with him even more an instinct than a principle; and he became the vates sacer of unsatisfied aspiration.  On the other hand, that he was not without elements of the temper which makes for order was shown by his punctilious, almost eager, observance of social conventions, and, in the last years of his life, by the horror excited in him by what he took to be the anarchy of Women’s Suffrage and Home Rule.  In the other two fields of opposition he belonged decisively to the spiritual and emotional reaction.  Spirit was for him the ultimate fact of existence, the soul and God were the indissoluble realities.  But his idealism was not potent and pure enough either to control the realist suggestions of his strong senses and energetic temperament, or to interpret them in its own terms.  And in the conflict between reason and feeling, or, as he put it, between “head” and “heart,” as sources of insight, and factors in human advancement, feeling found its most brilliant champion in Browning, and its most impressive statement in his doctrine of Love.  An utilitarian reduction of welldoing to a distribution of properly calculated doses of satisfaction he dismissed with a scorn as derisive as Carlyle’s; “general utility” was a favourite of “that old stager the devil."[145] Yet no critic of intellect ever used intellect more vigorously, and no preacher of the rights of the heart ever dealt less in flaccid sentiment.  Browning was Paracelsus as well as Aprile, and sharply as he chose to dissever “Knowledge” and “Love,” Love was for him never a foe of intellect, but a more gifted comrade who does the same work more effectively, who dives deeper, soars higher, welds more potently into more enduring unities, and flings upon dry hearts with a more infallible magic the seed of more marvellous new births.  Browning as the poet of Love is thus the last, and assuredly not the least, in the line which handed on the torch of Plato.  The author of the Phoedrus saw in the ecstasy of Love one of the avenues to the knowledge of the things that indeed are.  To Dante the supreme realities were mirrored in the eyes of Beatrice.  For Shelley Love was interwoven through all the mazes of Being; it was the source of the strength by which man masters his gods.  To all these masters of idealism Browning’s vision of Love owed something of its intensity and of its range.  With the ethical Love of Jesus and St Paul his affinities were more apparent, but less profound.  For him, too, love was the sum of all morality and the root of all goodness.  But it resembled more the joyous self-expansion of the Greek than the humility and self-abnegation of Christian love.  Not the saintly ascetic nor the doer of good works, but the artist and the “lover,” dominated his imagination when he wrote of Love; imbuing even God’s love for the world with the joy of creation and the rapture of embrace.  Aprile’s infinite love for things impelled him to body them visibly forth.  Deeper in Browning than his Christianity, and prior to it, lay his sense of immeasurable worth in all life, the poet’s passion for being.