These are the gospel to preach which he girds loin and lights the lamp, though he may perforce indulge a patron in shallower pieties of the conventional order, and though it is not all gospel with him, for now and again, when the moon shines and girls go skipping and singing down Florence streets--"Zooks, sir, flesh and blood, that's all I'm made of!" Fra Lippo with his outbreaks of frank sensuality is far nearer to Browning's kingdom of heaven than is the faultless painter; he presses with ardour towards his proper goal in art; he has full faith in the ideal, but with him it is to be sought only through the real; or rather it need not be sought at all, for one who captures any fragment of reality captures also undesignedly and inevitably its divine significance.[68] The same doctrine which is applied to art in _Old Pictures in Florence_, that high aims, though unattained, are of more worth than a lower achievement, is applied, and with a fine lyrical enthusiasm, to the pursuit of knowledge in _A Grammarian's Funeral_. The time is "shortly after the Revival of Learning in Europe"; the place-- a tall mountain, citied to the top, Crowded with culture!-- is imagined to suit the idea of the poem. The dead scholar, borne to the summit for burial on the shoulders of his disciples, had been possessed by the aspiration of Paracelsus--to know; and, unlike Paracelsus, he had never sought on earth both to know and to enjoy. He has been the saint and the martyr of Renaissance philology. For the genius of such a writer as the author of _Hudibras_, with his positive intellect and dense common sense, there could hardly have been found a fitter object for mockery than this remorseless and indefatigable pedant. Browning, through the singing voices of the dead master's disciples, exalts him to an eminence of honour and splendid fame. To a scholar Greek particles may serve as the fittest test of virtue; this glorious pedant has postponed life and the enjoyments of life to future cycles of existence; here on earth he expends a desperate passion--upon what? Upon the dryasdust intricacies of grammar; and it is not as though he had already attained; he only desperately follows after: That low man seeks a little thing to do, Sees it and does it: This high man, with a great thing to pursue, Dies ere he knows it. But again the grammarian, like the painter, does not strive after a vague, transcendental ideal; he is not as one that beateth the air; his quest for knowledge is definite and positive enough; he throws all care for infinite things, except the infinite of philological accuracy, upon God; and the viaticum of his last moments is one more point of grammar.