As we have seen, the reflections in Browning's poetry of his interest in public affairs are comparatively few, yet such glimpses as he has given prove him, beyond all doubt, to have been a democrat in principle, to have arrived, in fact, at the beginning of his career at a point beyond that attained by England's rulers at the end of the century. This far-sighted vision of his may have been another reason to be added to those mentioned at the beginning of the chapter why his interest in the practical affairs of his country did not more often express itself. The wrangling, the inconsequentialness, the eloquence expended upon mere personal interests which make up by far the larger proportion of all political agitation, are irritating to the last degree to a man of vision. His part was that of the philosopher and artist--to watch and to record in the portrayal of his many characters the underlying principle of freedom, which was the guiding star in all his work. IV SOCIAL IDEALS Browning's social ideals revolve about a trinity of values: the value of love, the value of truth, the value of evil. His ethics are the natural outgrowth of his mysticism and his idealism, with no touch of the utilitarianism which has been a distinctive mark of the fabric of English society during the nineteenth century, nor, on the other hand, of the hidebound conventionalism which has limited personal freedom in ways detrimental to just those aspects of social morality it was most anxious to preserve. The fact of which Browning seemed more conscious than of any other fact of his existence, and which, as we have seen, was the very core of his mysticism, was feeling. Things about which an ordinary man would feel no emotion at all start in his mind a train of thoughts, ending only in the perception of divine love. The eating of a palatable fig fills his heart with such gratefulness to the giver of the fig that immediately he fares forth upon the way which brings him into the presence of the Prime Giver from whom all gifts are received. What ecstasy of feeling in the artist aspiring through his art to the higher regions of Absolute Beauty in "Abt Vogler" of the poet who loves, aspiring to the divine through his human love in the epilogue to "Ferishtah's Fancies!" The perception of feeling was so intense that it became in him exalted and concentrated, incapable of dissipating itself in ephemeral sentimentalities, and this it is which gives feeling to Browning its mystical quality, and puts personal love upon the plane of a veritable revelation.