en seriously, as I propose doing, we must be
prepared to meet at the outset with some very grave difficulties. The
first of these is that it is an interpretation of facts by a human
emotion. To say that love blushes in the rose, or breaks into beauty in
the clouds, that it shows its strength in the storm, and sets the stars
in the sky, and that it is in all things the source of order and law,
may imply a principle of supreme worth both to poetry and religion; but
when we are asked to take it as a metaphysical explanation of facts, we
are prone, like the judges of Caponsacchi, not to "levity, or to
anything indecorous"--

"Only--I think I apprehend the mood:
There was the blameless shrug, permissible smirk,
The pen's pretence at play with the pursed mouth,
The titter stifled in the hollow palm
Which rubbed the eye-brow and caressed the nose,
When I first told my tale; they meant, you know--
'The sly one, all this we are bound believe!
Well, he can say no other than what he says.'"[A]

[Footnote A: _The Ring and the Book--Canon Caponsacchi_, 14-20.]

We are sufficiently willing to let the doctrine be held as a pious
opinion. The faith that "all's love yet all's law," like many another
illusion, if not hugged too closely, may comfort man's nakedness. But if
we are asked to substitute this view for that which the sciences
suggest,--if we are asked to put "Love" in the place of physical energy,
and, by assuming it as a principle, to regard as unreal all the infinite
misery of humanity and the degradation of intellect and character from
which it arises, common-sense seems at once to take the side of the
doleful sage of Chelsea. When the optimist postulates that the state of
the world, were it rightly understood, is completely satisfactory,
reason seems to be brought to a stand; and if poetry and religion
involve such a postulate, they are taken to be ministering to the
emotions at the expense of the intellect.

Browning, however, was not a mere sentimentalist who could satisfy his
heart without answering the questions of his intellect. Nor is his view
without support--at least, as regards the substance of it. The presence
of an idealistic element in things is recognized even by ordinary
thought; and no man's world is so poor that it would not be poorer still
for him, if it were reduced by the abstract sciences of nature into a
mere manifestation of physical force. Such a world Richter compares to
an empt