od,
or divided among men into their three great entities--love of ideas for
their truth and beauty; love of the natural universe, which is God's
garment; love of humanity, which is God's child--these pervade the whole
of Browning's poetry as the heat of the sun pervades the earth and every
little grain upon it. They make its warmth and life, strength and
beauty. They are too vast to be circumscribed in a lyric, represented in
a drama, bound up even in a long story of spiritual endeavour like
_Paracelsus_. But they move, in dignity, splendour and passion, through
all that he deeply conceived and nobly wrought; and their triumph and
immortality in his poetry are never for one moment clouded with doubt or
subject to death. This is the supreme thing in his work. To him Love is
the Conqueror, and Love is God.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] There is one simple story at least which he tells quite admirably,
_The Pied Piper of Hamelin_. But then, that story, if it is not troubled
by intellectual matter, is also not troubled by any deep emotion. It is
told by a poet who becomes a child for children.

* * * * *

CHAPTER X

_THE PASSIONS OTHER THAN LOVE_

The poems on which I have dwelt in the last chapter, though they are
mainly concerned with love between the sexes, illustrate the other noble
passions, all of which, such as joy, are forms of, or rather children
of, self-forgetful love. They do not illustrate the evil or ignoble
passions--envy, jealousy, hatred, base fear, despair, revenge, avarice
and remorse--which, driven by the emotion that so fiercely and swiftly
accumulates around them, master the body and soul, the intellect and the
will, like some furious tyrant, and in their extremes hurry their victim
into madness. Browning took some of these terrible powers and made them
subjects in his poetry. Short, sharp-outlined sketches of them occur in
his dramas and longer poems. There is no closer image in literature of
long-suppressed fear breaking out into its agony of despair than in the
lines which seal Guido's pleading in the _The Ring and the Book_.

Life is all!
I was just stark mad,--let the madman live
Pressed by as many chains as you please pile!
Don't open! Hold me from them! I am yours,
I am the Grand Duke's--no, I am the Pope's!
Abate,--Cardinal,--Christ,--Maria,--God, ...
Pompilia, will you let them murder me?

But there is no elaborate,