For him, too, love was the sum of all morality and the root of all goodness.

But it resembled more the joyous self-expansion of the Greek than the humility and self-abnegation of Christian love.

Not the saintly ascetic nor the doer of good works, but the artist and the "lover," dominated his imagination when he wrote of Love; imbuing even God's love for the world with the joy of creation and the rapture of embrace.

Aprile's infinite love for things impelled him to body them visibly forth.

Deeper in Browning than his Christianity, and prior to it, lay his sense of immeasurable worth in all life, the poet's passion for being.
[Footnote 145: _Red-cotton Night-cap Country_.] Browning's poetry is thus one of the most potent of the influences which in the nineteenth century helped to break down the shallow and mischievous distinction between the "sacred" and the "secular," and to set in its place the profounder division between man enslaved by apathy, routine, and mechanical morality, and man lifted by the law of love into a service which is perfect freedom, into an approximation to God which is only the fullest realisation of humanity.
INDEX.
Note--The names of the Persons are given in small capitals; titles of literary works in _italics_; other names in ordinary type; *black figures* indicate the more detailed references.