If we see the thoughtful and brilliant Browning in the "Fancies" proper, we perhaps see even more clearly the emotional and passionate Browning in the lyrics which add variety and an unwonted charm to the whole. This feature is also borrowed from Persian form, an interesting example of which has been given to English readers in Edwin Arnold's "Gulistan" or "Rose Garden" of the poet Sa'di. Indeed Browning evidently derived the hint for his humorous prologue in which he likens the poems to follow to an Italian dish made of ortolans on toast with a bitter sage leaf, symbolizing sense, sight, and song from Sa'di's preface to the "Rose Garden," wherein he says, "Yet will men of light and learning, from whom the true countenance of a discourse is not concealed, be well aware that herein the pearls of good counsel which heal are threaded on strings of right sense; that the bitter physic of admonition is constantly mingled with the honey of good humor, so that the spirits of listeners grow not sad, and that they remain not exempt from blessings of acceptance." A further interest attaches to these lyrics because they form a series of emotional phases in the soul-life of two lovers whom we are probably justified in regarding as Mr. and Mrs. Browning. One naturally thinks of them as companion pictures to Mrs. Browning's "Sonnets from the Portuguese." In these the sunrise of a great love is portrayed with intense and exalted passion, while the lyrics in "Ferishtah's Fancies" reflect the subsequent development of such a love, through the awakening of whole new realms of feeling, wherein love for humanity is enlarged criticism from the one beloved welcome; all the little trials of life dissolved in the new light; and divine love realized with a force never before possible. Do we not see a living portrait of the two poets in the lyric "So the head aches and the limbs are faint?" Many a hint may be found in the Browning letters to prove that Mrs. Browning with just such a frail body possessed a fire of spirit that carried her constantly toward attainment, while he, with all the vigor of splendid health, could with truth have frequently said, "In the soul of me sits sluggishness." These exquisite lyrics, which, whether they conform to Elizabethan models or not, are as fine as anything ever done in this form, are crowned by the epilogue in which we hear the stricken husband crying out to her whom twenty years earlier he had called his "lyric love," in a voice doubting, yet triumphing in the thought that his lifelong optimism is the light radiating from the halo which her human love had irised round his head. No more emphatic way than the interspersion of these emotional lyrics could have been chosen to bring home the poet's conviction of the value of emotion in finding a positive basis for religious belief.