God’s gifts put man’s best dreams to shame.

The line contrasts human aspiration with divine generosity: even our highest hopes and “best dreams” are outstripped by what God can give. Read devotionally, it expresses humility—human imagination is limited, while grace exceeds expectation. It can also be taken as a consolatory claim: what arrives through providence may surpass what one dared to wish for, so disappointment in one’s plans is not the final measure of possibility. In Browning’s religiously inflected poetics, such a sentiment typically elevates faith over self-reliance, suggesting that fulfillment is ultimately received rather than engineered.