The lover cannot, like the
scientific investigator, miss his mark, he cannot be baffled or misled;
the object of his love may be unworthy, or unresponsive, but in the mere
act of loving he has his reward.

"Knowledge means
Ever renewed assurance by defeat
That victory is somehow still to reach;
But love is victory, the prize itself."[140]

[Footnote 140: _Pillar of Sebzevir_.]

This aspect of Browning's doctrine of love, though it inspired some of
his most exalted lyrics, throws into naked relief the dearth of social
consciousness in Browning's psychology. Yet it is easy to see that the
absolute self-sufficiency into which he lifted the bare fact of love was
one of the mainsprings of his indomitable optimism. In Love was
concentrated all that emancipates man from the stubborn continuities of
Nature. It started up in corrupt or sordid hearts, and swept all their
blind velleities into its purifying flame of passion--

"Love is incompatible
With falsehood,--purifies, assimilates
All other passions to itself."[141]

[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