670 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
The point has now been sufficiently established for us to take 
another step, and pursue the consequences of this primary po¬ 
sition in the poet’s system of thought. Herein, we shall do no 
injustice, I hope, to Browning, who advanced his claim to “fig¬ 
ure as Metaphysic Poet” 
though he forego his Promised Land 
Thereby, have Satan claim his carcass. 
(.Sordello III. 829-30.) 
The difficult passage from the end of Sordello quoted at the 
conclusion of my preceding section shows that it was upon 
Man’s aspiration for the infinite and the inadequacy of this 
world to satisfy it that Browning based the belief in God he 
had already asserted in Pauline. The whole of Sordello’s final 
meditation is as significant as the last words of Paracelsus. All 
is at last known to him, and he sees the secret of his past de¬ 
spair; he has failed to adjust infinite inspiration to finite con¬ 
ditions. Man’s powers of action are limited, and his aim should 
therefore be limited to some simple course; but to limit the as¬ 
pirations of the soul is to brutalize and degrade it. How can 
life be so ordered as to solve this dilemma ? Only by the power 
of Love, -which places man in relation to the divine, and gives 
him a compelling motive for service to humanity. The Power 
above—God—is an absolute necessity if man’s infinite aspira¬ 
tions and limited faculties are to be reconciled. The point is 
again more clearly brought out in the later poems, e. g. The 
Inn A lbum 449-456: 
Better have failed in the high aim, as I, 
Than vulgarly in the low aim succeed 
As, God be thanked, I do not! Ugliness 
Had I called beauty, falsehood—truth, and you 
—My lover! No—this earth’s unchanged for me, 
By his enchantment whom God made the Prince 
O’ the Power o’ the Air, into a Heaven; there is 
Heaven, since there is Heaven’s simulation—earth. 
Browning, of course, did not advance this as a proof. It is 
a postulate, a necessary hypothesis: 
Question, answer presuppose 
Two points: that the thing itself which questions, answers,— w, it 
knows; 
As it also knows the thing perceived outside itself,—a force 
