Browning values the individual so much that he lays all his emphasis upon the development of stronger passions and aspirations, the unfolding of a more vivid and intense personality, and has comparatively little stress to lay upon the larger thought of the progress of mankind in harmony and order. Indeed he poetizes so vigorously against the conventional judgments of society that he often seems to set himself against the moral sentiments on which those conventional judgments, however warped, ultimately rest. “Over and over again in Browning’s poetry,” says a penetrating critic, “we meet with this insistence on the value of moments of high excitement, of intense living, of full experience of pleasure, even though such moments be of the essence of evil and fruitful in all dark consequences.” Take for example his treatment of love. He is right in saying “Love is best.” But is he right in admitting, even by inference, that love has a right to take its own way of realizing itself? Can love be at its best unless it is obedient to law? Does it not make its truest music when it keeps its place in the harmony of purity and peace and good living? Surely the wild and reckless view of love as its own law which seems to glimmer through the unconsumed smoke of Browning’s later poems, such as _Fifine at the Fair_, _The Inn Album_, and _Red Cotton Nightcap Country_, needs correction by a true flash of insight like that which we find in two lines of _One Word More_: “_Dante, who loved well because he hated,_ _Hated wickedness that hinders loving._” Browning was at times misled by a perilous philosophy into a position where the vital distinction between good and evil dissolved away in a cloud of unreality. In _Ferishtah’s Fancies_ and _Parleyings with Certain People of Importance_, any one who has the patience to read them will find himself in a nebulous moral world. The supposed necessity of showing that evil is always a means to good tempts to the assertion that it has no other reality. Perhaps it is altogether an illusion, needed to sting us into conflict, but really non-existent. Perhaps it is only the shadow cast by the good,—or “the silence implying sound.” Perhaps it is good in disguise, not yet developed from the crawling worm into the creature with wings. After this fashion the whimsical dervish Ferishtah strews his beans upon the table. “This bean was white, this—black, Set by itself,—but see if good and bad Each following other in companionship, Black have not grown less black and white less white, Till blackish seems but dun, and whitish,—gray, And the whole line turns—well, or black to thee Or white alike to me—no matter which.”