ch
it moved, Love, the most intimate, intense, and marvellous of all vital
energies, was the ideal centre towards which it converged. In Love, as
Browning understood it, all those elementary joys of his found
satisfaction. There he saw the flawless purity which rejoiced him in
Pompilia's soul, which "would not take pollution, ermine-like armed from
dishonour by its own soft snow." There he saw sudden incalculableness of
power abruptly shattering the continuities of routine, throwing life
instantly into a new perspective, and making barren trunks break into
sudden luxuriance like the palm; or, again, intimately interpenetrating
soul with soul,--"one near one is too far"; or entangling the whole
creation in the inextricable embrace of God.

But if all his instincts and imaginative proclivities found their ideal
in Love, they also insensibly impressed their own character upon his
conception of it. The "Love" which has so deep a significance for
Browning is a Love steeped in the original complexion of his mind, and
bearing the impress of the singular position which he occupies in the
welter of nineteenth-century intellectual history. His was one of the
rare natures in which revolutionary liberalism and spiritual reaction,
encountering in nearly equal strength, seem to have divided their
principles and united their forces. Psychologically, the one had its
strongest root in the temper which reasons, and values ideas; the other
in that which feels, and values emotions. Sociologically, the one stood
for individualism, the other for solidarity. In their ultimate
presuppositions, the one inclined to the standpoint of the senses and
experience; the other to a mostly vague and implicit idealism. In their
political ideals, the one strove for progress, and for freedom as its
condition; the other for order, and for active legal intervention as its
safeguard.

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, i