To renounce the world, if interpreted aright, is to extinguish or suppress no faculty that has been given to man, but rather to put each faculty to its highest uses: "Renounce the world!"-- Ah, were it done By merely cutting one by one Your limbs off, with your wise head last, How easy were it!--how soon past, If once in the believing mood.
The harder and the higher renunciation is this--to choose the things of the spirit rather than the things of sense, and again in accepting, as means of our earthly discipline and development, the things of sense to press through these to the things of the spirit which lie behind and beyond and above them.
Such, and such alone, is the asceticism to which Browning summons his disciple; it is the asceticism of energy not that of atrophy; it does not starve the senses, but reinforces the spirit; it results not in a cloistered but a militant virtue.

A certain self-denial it may demand, but the self-denial becomes the condition of a higher joy.

And if life with its trials frays the flesh, what matters it when the light of the spirit shines through with only a fuller potency?
In the choice between sense and spirit, or, to put it more generally, in the choice between what is higher and less high, lies the probation of a soul, and also its means of growth.

And what is the meaning of this mortal life--this strange phenomenon otherwise so unintelligible--if it be not the moment in which a soul is proved, the period in which a soul is shaped and developed for other lives to come?
To forget that Browning is a preacher may suit a dainty kind of criticism which detaches the idea of beauty from the total of our humanity addressed by the greater artists.

But the solemn thoughts that are taken up by beauty in such work, for example, as that of Michael Angelo, are an essential element or an essential condition of its peculiar character as a thing of beauty.