His love!—Now take love! Well betide
Thy tardy conscience!"A
A: Easter Day.
In his later reflective poems, in which he deals with the problems of life in the spirit of a metaphysician, seeking a definite answer to the questions of the intelligence, he declares the reason for his preference of love to knowledge. In La Saisiaz he states that man's love is God's too, a spark from His central fire; but man's knowledge is man's only. Knowledge is finite, limited and tinged with sense. The truth we reach at best is only truth for us, relative, distorted. We are for ever kept from the fact which is supposed to be given; our intellects play about it; sense and even intellect itself are interposing media, which we must use, and yet, in using them, we only fool ourselves with semblances. The poet has now grown so cautious that he will not declare his own knowledge to be valid for any other man. David Hume could scarcely be more suspicious of the human intellect; nor Berkeley more surely persuaded of the purely subjective nature of its attainments. In fact, the latter relied on human knowledge in a way impossible to Browning, for he regarded it as the language of spirit speaking to spirit. Out of his experience, Browning says,
"There crowds conjecture manifold.
But, as knowledge, this comes only,—things may be as I behold
Or may not be, but, without me and above me, things there are;
I myself am what I know not—ignorance which proves no bar
To the knowledge that I am, and, since I am, can recognize
What to me is pain and pleasure: this is sure, the rest—surmise."A