[52] feelings like this, so much has been said of it by the sentimental, who talk what they could not have felt. But it is so deeply, sincerely so in me, that sometimes it will overflow. Well, there is a heaven,--a heaven,--a world of love, and love after all is the lifeblood, the existence, the all in all of mind.
This is the key to her whole life. She was impelled by love, and did what she did, and wrote what she did, under the impulse of love. Never could “Uncle Tom's Cabin” or The minister's Wooing have been written, unless by one to whom love was the “life-blood of existence, the all in all of mind.” Years afterwards Mrs. Browning was to express this same thought in the language of poetry.
But when a soul by choice and conscience doth
Throw out her full force on another soul,
The conscience and the concentration both
Make mere life love. For life in perfect whole
And aim consummated is love in sooth,
As nature's magnet heat rounds pole with pole.
