"adds worth to worth,
As wine enriches blood, and straightway sends it forth,
Conquering and to conquer, through all eternity,
That's battle without end."B
B: Ibid. liv.
This view of the significance of love grew on Browning as his knowledge of man's nature and destiny became fuller and deeper, while, at the same time, his trust in the intellect became less. Even in Paracelsus he reveals love, not as a sentiment or intoxicating passion, as one might expect from a youthful poet, but as one of the great fundamental "faculties" of man. Love, "blind, oft-failing, half-enlightened, often-chequered trust," though it be, still makes man
"The heir of hopes too fair to turn out false."
In that poem, love is definitely lifted by the poet to the level of knowledge. Intellectual gain, apart from love, is folly and futility, worthless for the individual and worthless to the race. "Mind is nothing but disease," Paracelsus cries in the bitterness of his disappointment, "and natural health is ignorance"; and he asks of the mad poet who "loved too rashly,"
"Are we not halves of one dissevered world,
Whom this strange chance unites once more? Part? Never!