In La Saisiaz Browning reasons of God and the soul, of life here and of life to come.  The poem is addressed to a friend of old date, who died suddenly while she was staying with Browning and his sister, in the summer of 1877, at a villa called La Saisiaz (The Sun) in the mountains near Geneva.  The first twenty pages tell the touching story; the rest of the poem records the argument which it called forth.  “Was ending ending once and always, when you died?” Browning asks himself, and he attempts to answer the question, not on traditional grounds, or on the authority of a creed, but by honest reasoning.  He assumes two postulates, and two only, that God exists and that the soul exists; and he proceeds to show, very forcibly, the unsatisfactory nature of life if consciousness ends with death, and its completely satisfactory nature if the soul’s existence continues.

                          “Without the want,
      Life, now human, would be brutish:  just that hope, however scant,
      Makes the actual life worth leading; take the hope therein away,
      All we have to do is surely not endure another day. 
      This life has its hopes for this life, hopes that promise joy: 
          life done—­
      Out of all the hopes, how many had complete fulfilment? none. 
      ‘But the soul is not the body’:  and the breath is not the flute;
      Both together make the music:  either marred and all is mute.”

This hypothesis is purely personal, and as such he holds it.  But, to his own mind at least, he finds that

      “Sorrow did and joy did nowise,—­life well weighed—­preponderate. 
      By necessity ordained thus?  I shall bear as best I can;
      By a cause all-good, all-wise, all-potent?  No, as I am man!”

Yet, if only the assumption of a future life may be made, he will thankfully acquiesce in an earthly failure, which will then be only relative, and the earnest of a heavenly gain.  Having arrived at this point, Browning proceeds to argue out the question yet further, under the form of a dialogue between “Fancy” (or the soul’s instinct) and “Reason.”  He here shows that not merely is life explicable only as a probation, but that probation is only possible under our present conditions, in our present uncertainty.  If it were made certain that there is a future life in which we shall be punished or rewarded, according as we do evil or good, we should have no choice of action, hence no virtue in doing what were so manifestly to our own advantage.  Again, if we were made certain of this future life of higher faculties and greater happiness, should we hesitate to rush to it at the first touch of sorrow, before our time?  He ends, therefore, with a “hope—­no more than hope, but hope—­no less than hope,” which amounts practically to the assurance that, as he puts it in the last line—­

      “He at least believed in Soul, was very sure of God!”