bound up with the popular conception of God’s love, had nothing to do with his conception of it, and he could thus consistently decline the name of Christian, as some witnesses aver that he did.[42] It was thus in entire keeping with his way of approaching Christianity that he imagined this moving episode,—­the dying apostle whose genius had made that way so singularly persuasive, the little remnant of doomed and hunted fugitives who seem to belong to earth only by the spiritual bond of their love to him, as his own physical life is now a firebrand all but extinct,—­“all ashes save the tip that holds a spark,” but that still glowing with undiminished soul.  The material fabric which enshrines this fine essence of the Christian spirit is of the frailest; and the contrast is carried out in the scenic setting,—­the dim cool cavern, with its shadowy depth and faint glimmerings of day, the hushed voices, the ragged herbage, and the glory in the face of the passing saint within; without, the hard dazzling glare of the desert noon, and the burning blue, and the implacable and triumphant might of Rome.

[Footnote 42:  Other testimony, it is true, equally strong, asserts that he accepted the name; in any case he used it in a sense of his own.]

The discourse of the “aged friend” is full of subtle and vivid thinking, and contains some of Browning’s most memorable utterances about Love, in particular the noble lines—­

     “For life with all it yields of joy and woe ... 
      Is just our chance of the prize of learning love,
      How love might be, hath been indeed, and is.”

Nowhere, either, do we see more clearly how this master-conception of his won control of his reasoning powers, framing specious ladders to conclusions towards which his whole nature yearned, but which his vision of the world did not uniformly bear out.  Man loved, and God would not be above man if He did not also love.  The horrible spectre of a God who has power without love never ceased to lurk in the background of Browning’s thought, and he strove with all his resources of dialectic and poetry to exorcise it.  And no wonder.  For a loving God was the very keystone of Browning’s scheme of life and of the world, and its withdrawal would have meant for him the collapse of the whole structure.

It is no accident that the Death in the Desert is followed immediately by a theological study in a very different key, Caliban upon Setebos.  For in this brilliantly original “dramatic monologue” Caliban—­the “savage man”—­appears “mooting the point ‘What is God?’” and constructing his answer frankly from his own nature.  It was quite in Browning’s way to take a humorous delight in imagining grotesque parallels to ideas and processes in which he profoundly believed; a proclivity aided by the curious subtle relation between his grotesquerie and his seriousness, which makes Pacchiarotto, for instance, closely similar in effect to parts of