To either of these extreme factions Browning's attitude is equally incomprehensible. The first cries out against his liberalness, the second, declaring that human emotion should be untrammeled by either Church, law or God, would find him a pernicious influence against freedom; there are, however, many shades of opinion between the two extremes which would feel sympathy with his ideals in one or more directions. The chief difficulty in the acceptance of the ideal for most people is that they have not yet developed to the plane where feeling comes to them with the intensity, the concentration, the depth or the constancy that brings with it the sense of revelation. For many people law or the Church is absolutely necessary to preserve such feeling as they are capable of from dissipating itself in shallow sentimentalism; while one or the other will always be necessary in some form because love has its social as well as its personal aspect. Yet the law and the Church should both allow sufficient freedom for the breaking of relations from which all sincerity has departed, even though humanity as a whole has not yet and probably will not for many ages arrive at Browning's conception of human love. Truth to one's own highest vision in love being a cardinal principle with Browning, it follows that truth to one's nature in any direction is desirable. He even carries this doctrine of truth to the individual nature so far as to base upon it an apology for the most unmitigated villain he has portrayed, Guido, and to put this apology into the mouth of the person he had most deeply wronged, Pompilia. With exquisite vision she, even, can say: "But where will God be absent! In his face Is light, but in his shadow healing too: Let Guido touch the shadow and be healed! And as my presence was unfortunate,-- My earthly good, temptation and a snare,-- Nothing about me but drew somehow down His hate upon me,--somewhat so excused Therefore, since hate was thus the truth of him,-- May my evanishment for evermore Help further to relieve the heart that cast Such object of its natural loathing forth! So he was made; he nowise made himself: I could not love him, but his mother did."