Browning was master of more potent weapons of the strictly intellectual kind than many poets of his rank, and his work is charged with convictions which bear upon philosophic problems and involve philosophic ideas.

But they were neither systematic deductions from a speculative first principle nor fragments of tradition eclectically pieced together; by their very ambiguity and Protean many-sidedness they betrayed that, however tinged they might be on the surface with speculative or traditional phrases, the nourishing roots sprang from the heart of joyous vitality in a primitive and original temperament.

In Browning, if in any man, Joy sang that "strong music of the soul" which re-creates all the vitalities of the world, and endows us with "a new Earth and a new Heaven." And if joy was the root of Browning's intuition, and life "in widest commonalty spread" the element in which 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.