"the person whom it celebrates was a cloud instead of a Juno," and continues, "If you are curious, however, to hear what I am and have been, it will tell you something thereof. It is an idealized history of my life and feelings. I think one is always in love with something or other; the error--and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it--consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal."
No poet has a more distinct philosophy of life than Browning. Indeed he has as much a right to a place among the philosophers, as Plato has to one among the poets. Browning is a seer, and pre-eminently a mystic; and it is especially interesting as in the case of Plato and St Paul, to encounter this latter quality as a dominating characteristic of the mind of so keen and logical a dialectician. We see at once that the main position of Browning's belief is identical with what we have found to be the characteristic of mysticism--unity under diversity at the centre of all existence. The same essence, the one life, expresses itself through every diversity of form.
God is seen In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod.
And through all these forms there is growth upwards. Indeed, it is only upon this supposition that the poet can account for
many a thrill Of kinship, I confess to, with the powers Called Nature: animate, inanimate In parts or in the whole, there's something there Man-like that somehow meets the man in me.
The poet sees that in each higher stage we benefit by the garnered experience of the past; and so man grows and expands and becomes capable of feeling for and with everything that lives. At the same time the higher is not degraded by having worked in and through the lower, for he distinguishes between the continuous persistent life, and the temporary coverings it makes use of on its upward way;
From first to last of lodging, I was I, And not at all the place that harboured me.
Humanity then, in Browning's view, is not a collection of individuals, separate and often antagonistic, but one whole.
When I say "you" 'tis the common soul, The collective I mean: the race of Man That receives life in parts to live in a whole And grow here according to God's clear plan.