He held himself as free to draw his inspiration from the gift of good health as from the gift of learning or the gift of fellowship.

But he held that such gifts were in life innumerable and varied, and that every man, or at least almost every man, possessed some window looking out on this essential excellence of things.
Browning's optimism then, since we must continue to use this somewhat inadequate word, was a result of experience--experience which is for some mysterious reason generally understood in the sense of sad or disillusioning experience.

An old gentleman rebuking a little boy for eating apples in a tree is in the common conception the type of experience.

If he really wished to be a type of experience he would climb up the tree himself and proceed to experience the apples.
Browning's faith was founded upon joyful experience, not in the sense that he selected his joyful experiences and ignored his painful ones, but in the sense that his joyful experiences selected themselves and stood out in his memory by virtue of their own extraordinary intensity of colour.

He did not use experience in that mean and pompous sense in which it is used by the worldling advanced in years.