cold unreason of duty which, as in _Bifurcation_,
keeps lovers meant for each other apart. It is by love that the soul
solves the problem--so tragically insoluble to poor Sordello--of
"fitting to the finite its infinity," and satisfying the needs of Time
and Eternity at once;[144] for Love, belonging equally to both spheres,
can bring the purposes of body and soul into complete accord:

"Like yonder breadth of watery heaven, a bay
And that sky-space of water, ray for ray
And star for star, one richness where they mixed,
As this and that wing of an angel, fixed
Tumultuary splendours."

[Footnote 144: _Sordello, sub fin_.]

In a life thus thrilled into harmony heaven was already realised on
earth; and Eternity itself could but continue what Time had begun.
Death, for such a soul, was not an awaking, for it had not slept; nor an
emancipation, for it was already free; nor a satisfying of desire, for
the essence of Love was to want; it was only a point at which the "last
ride together" might pass into an eternal "riding on"--

"With life for ever old, yet new,
Changed not in kind but in degree,
The instant made Eternity,--
And Heaven just prove that I and she
Ride, ride together, for ever ride!"

VI.

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 whi