From  "The  Doll's  House"  to  "WTien  We
That  Are  Dead  Awaken"  the  same  lesson  is
taught.  Few  people  realize  that  this  is  the
keynote  of  Browning's  teaching,  or  would  be


370    BROWNING  AND  HIS  CENTURY

ready  to  regard  him  as  a  prophet  of  an  ideal
of  love  which  shaU  come  to  be  seen  as  the
true  one  after  the  science  of  eugenics,  the
latest  of  the  exact  sciences,  has  found  itself
as  powerless  as  all  other  sciences  have  been  to
touch  the  reality  of  life,  because  amid  all
the  mysteries  of  the  universe  none  is  greater
than  the  spiritual  mystery  of  love.  Among
writers  who  are  to-day  recognizing  a  part  of
the  truth,  at  least,  is  Ellen  Key,  but  neither
she  nor  Ibsen  has  insisted  in  the  way  that
Browning  has  upon  the  mystical  source  of
human  love.  That  Browning  is  the  poet  who
has  given  the  world  the  utmost  certainty  of
God,  the  soul  and  immortality,  and  the  most
inspiring  ideals  of  human  love,  will  be  more
completely  recognized  in  the  future.  As  time
goes  on  he  will  emerge  above  the  tumultuous
intellectual  life  of  the  present,  which,  with  its
enormous  increase  of  knowledge  of  phenomena,
bringing  with  it  a  fairly  titanic  mastery  of  the
forces  of  nature,  and  its  generation  of  multi-
tudes of  ideas  upon  every  conceivable  sub-
ject, many  of  them  trite,  many  of  them
puerile,  and  some  of  them  no  doubt  of  genuine
value,  obscures  for  the  time  being  the
greatness  of  any  one  voice.  A  little  later,
when  the  winnowing  of  ideas  shall  come.
