"To suffer, did pangs bring the loved one bliss, Wring knowledge from ignorance:--just for this-- To add one drop to a love--abyss! "Enough: for you doubt, you hope, O men, You fear, you agonize, die: what then? Is an end to your life's work out of ken? "Have you no assurance that, earth at end, Wrong will prove right? Who made shall mend In the higher sphere to which yearnings tend?" In his attitude toward the existence of evil Browning takes issue with Carlyle, as already noted in the second chapter. Carlyle, as Browning represents him, cannot reconcile the existence of evil with beneficent and omniscient power. He makes the opponent, who is an echo of Carlyle in the argument in "Bernard de Mandeville," exclaim: "Where's Knowledge, where power and will in evidence 'Tis Man's-play merely! Craft foils rectitude, Malignity defeats beneficence, And grant, at very last of all, the feud 'Twixt good and evil ends, strange thoughts intrude Though good be garnered safely and good's foe Bundled for burning. Thoughts steal even so-- Why grant tares leave to thus o'ertop, o'ertower Their field-mate, boast the stalk and flaunt the flower, Triumph one sunny minute?" No attempt must be made to show God's reason for allowing evil. Any such attempt will fail. This passage comes as near as any in Browning to a plunge into the larger social questions which during the nineteenth century have come more and more to the front, and is an index of just where the poet stood in relation to the social movements of the century's end. His gaze was so centered upon the individual and the power of the individual to work out his own salvation and the need of evil in the process that his philosophical attitude toward evil quite overtops the militant interest in overcoming it.