iscovers
and reveals, together with every other inner quality and outer state of
being, have only relative worth. "There is nothing either in the world
or out of it which is unconditionally good, except a good will," said
Kant; and a good will, according to Browning, is a will that wills
lovingly. From love all other goodness is derived. There is earnest
meaning, and not mere sentiment, in the poet's assertion that

"There is no good of life but love--but love!
What else looks good, is some shade flung from love.
Love gilds it, gives it worth. Be warned by me,
Never you cheat yourself one instant! Love,
Give love, ask only love, and leave the rest!"[A]

[Footnote A: _In a Balcony_.]

"Let man's life be true," he adds, "and love's the truth of mine." To
attain this truth, that is, to constitute love into the inmost law of
his being, and permanent source of all his activities, is the task of
man. And Browning defines that love as

"Yearning to dispense,
Each one its own amount of gain thro' its own mode
Of practising with life."

There is no need of illustrating further the doctrine, so evident in
Browning, that "love" is the ideal which in man's life makes through
conflict for its own fulfilment. From what has been already said, it is
abundantly plain that love is to him a divine element, which is at war
with all that is lower in man and around him, and which by reaction
against circumstance converts its own mere promise into fruition and
fact. Through love man's nature reaches down to the permanent essence,
amid the fleeting phenomena of the world, and is at one with what is
first and last. As loving he ranks with God. No words are too strong to
represent the intimacy of the relation. For, however limited in range
and tainted with alien qualities human love may be, it is still "a
pin-point rock of His boundless continent." It is not a semblance of the
divine nature, an analogon, or verisimilitude, but the love of God
himself in man: so that man is in this sense an incarnation of the
divine. The Godhood in him constitutes him, so that he cannot become
himself, or attain his own ideal or true nature, except by becoming
perfect as God is perfect.

But the emphasis thus laid on the divine worth and dignity of human love
is balanced by the stress which the poet places on the frailty and
finitude of every other human attribute. Having elevated the ideal, he
degrades the actual. Knowledge and