Humanity's new wrong, motherhood's first disgrace."A
A: Ivàn Ivànovitch.
This instinct of love, which binds brute-parent to brute-offspring, is a kind of spiritual law in the natural world: it, like all law, guarantees the continuity and unity of the world, and it is scarcely akin to merely physical attraction. No doubt its basis is physical; it has an organism of flesh and blood for its vehicle and instrument: but mathematical physics cannot explain it, nor can it be detected by chemical tests. Rather, with the poet, we are to regard brute affection as a kind of rude outline of human love; as a law in nature, which, when understood by man and adopted as his rule of conduct, becomes the essence and potency of his moral life.
Thus Browning regards love as an omnipresent good. There is nothing, he tells us in Fifine, which cannot reflect it; even moral putridity becomes phosphorescent, "and sparks from heaven transpierce earth's coarsest covertures."
"There is no good of life but love—but love!
What else looks good, is some shade flung from love,
Love gilds it, gives it worth."B
B: In a balcony.
There is no fact which, if seen to the heart, will not prove itself to have love for its purpose, and, therefore, for its substance. And it is on this account that everything finds its place in a kosmos and that there is
"No detail but, in place allotted it, was prime