Daisies and grass be my heart's bed-fellows On the mound wind spares and sunshine mellows: Dance you, reds and whites and yellows! Of failure in intellectual or imaginative force the _Parleyings_ show no symptom. But the vigour of Browning's will did a certain wrong to his other powers. He did not wait, as in early days, for the genuine casual inspirations of pleasure. He made it his task to work out all that was in him. And what comes to a writer of genius is better than what is laboriously sought. We may gather wood for the altar, but the true fire must descend from heaven. The speed and excitement kindled by one's own exertions are very different from the varying stress of a wind that bears one onward without the thump and rattle of the engine-room. It would have been a gain if Browning's indomitable steam-engines had occasionally ceased to ply, and he had been compelled to wait for a propitious breeze. Philosophy, Love, Poetry, Politics, Painting (the nude, with a discourse concerning evolution), Painting again (the modern _versus_ the mythological in art), Music, and, if we add the epilogue, the Invention of Printing--these are the successive themes of Browning's _Parleyings_, and they are important and interesting themes. Unfortunately the method of discussion is neither sufficiently abstract for the lucid exposition of ideas, nor sufficiently concrete for the pure communication of poetic pleasure. Abstract and concrete meet and take hands or jostle, too much as skeleton and lady might in a _danse Macabre_. The spirit of acquiescence--strenuous not indolent acquiescence--with our intellectual limitations is constantly present. Does man groan because he cannot comprehend the mind outside himself which manifests itself in the sun? Well, did not Prometheus draw the celestial rays into the pin-point of a flame which man can order, and which does him service? Is the fire a little thing beside the immensity in the heavens above us? Little? In little, light, warmth, life are blessed-- Which, in the large, who sees to bless? Or again--it is Christopher Smart, who triumphs for once so magnificently in his "Song to David," and fails, with all his contemporaries, in the poetry of ambitious instruction. And why? Because for once he was content with the first step that poetry should take--to confer enjoyment, leaving instruction--the fruit of enjoyment--to come later. True learning teaches through love and delight, not through pretentious didactics,--a truth forgotten by the whole tribe of eighteenth century versifiers. And once more--does Francis Furini paint the naked body in all its beauty? Right! let him study precisely this divine thing the body, before he looks upward; let him retire from the infinite into his proper circumscription: Only by looking low, ere looking high, Comes penetration of the mystery.