For to acknowledge this was to recognise that love was divine, and that mankind at large, in virtue of their gift of love, shared in God's nature, finite as they were; that whatever clouds of intellectual illusion they walked in, they were lifted to a hold upon reality as unassailable as God's own by the least glimmer of love. Whatever else is obscure or elusive in Browning, he never falters in proclaiming the absolute and flawless worth of love. The lover cannot, like the scientific investigator, miss his mark, he cannot be baffled or misled; the object of his love may be unworthy, or unresponsive, but in the mere act of loving he has his reward. "Knowledge means Ever renewed assurance by defeat That victory is somehow still to reach; But love is victory, the prize itself."[140] [Footnote 140: _Pillar of Sebzevir_.] This aspect of Browning's doctrine of love, though it inspired some of his most exalted lyrics, throws into naked relief the dearth of social consciousness in Browning's psychology. Yet it is easy to see that the absolute self-sufficiency into which he lifted the bare fact of love was one of the mainsprings of his indomitable optimism. In Love was concentrated all that emancipates man from the stubborn continuities of Nature. It started up in corrupt or sordid hearts, and swept all their blind velleities into its purifying flame of passion-- "Love is incompatible With falsehood,--purifies, assimilates All other passions to itself."[141] [Footnote 141: _Colombe's Birthday_.] And the glimmer of soul that lurked in the veriest act of humanity the breath of love could quicken into pervading fire.[142] Love was only the most intense and potent of those sudden accesses of vitality which are wont, in Browning, suddenly to break like a flame from the straw and dross of a brutish or sophisticated consciousness, confounding foresight and calculation, but giving endless stimulus to hope. Even in the contact with sin and sorrow Browning saw simply the touch of Earth from which Love, like Antaeus, sprang into fuller being; they were the "dread machinery" devised to evolve man's moral qualities, "to make him love in turn and be beloved."[143] [Footnote 142: _Fifine_.] [Footnote 143: _The Pope_.]