A flower is never only a flower, or a beast a beast.

And so Browning would have said in the days when he was still a lover of Nature as well as of man, when he was still a faithful soldier in the army of imagination, a poet more than a philosopher at play.

It is a sad business.

He has not lost his eagerness to advance, to climb beyond the flaming walls, to find God in his heaven.

He has not lost the great hopes with which he began, nor the ideals he nursed of old.