And, once more, if again and again the same idea shows its power over the feelings and inspires elevated lyrical utterance, or if in pieces of casuistical brain-work it enters as a passionate element and domineers by its own authority, if it originates not debate but song or that from which song is made, we know that the writer's heart has embraced it as a truth of the emotions.
Because Browning had his own well-defined view of truth, he could confidently lend his mind away to his fifty or his hundred men and women.

They served to give his ideas a concrete body.

By sympathy and by intelligence he widened the basis of his own existence.

If the poet loses himself to find himself again through sympathy with external nature, how much more and in how many enriching ways through sympathy with humanity! Thus new combinations of thought and feeling are effected.

Thus a kind of experiment is made with our own ideas by watching how they behave when brought into connection with these new combinations.