The poem itself--as a defence of his poetic methods--was an "adventure" in which imagination played an unusually splendid part. A succession of brilliant and original images, visions, similes, parables, exhibits the twofold nature of the "stuff" with which the artist plays,--its inferiority, its poverty, its "falseness" in itself, its needfulness, its potency, its worth for him. It is the water which supports the swimmer, but in which he cannot live; the dross of straw and chaff which yields the brilliant purity of flame (c. 55); the technical cluster of sounds from which issues "music--that burst of pillared cloud by day and pillared fire by night" (c. 41). The whole poem is haunted by the sense of dissonance which these images suggest between the real and the apparent meaning of things. Browning's world, else so massive and so indubitable, becomes unsubstantial and phantasmal, an illusive pageant in which Truth is present only under a mask, being "forced to manifest itself through falsehood." Juan, who declares that, unlike poets, "we prose-folk" always dream, has, in effect, a visionary quality of imagination which suits his thesis and his theme. The "dream figures" of the famous ladies pass before us like a gorgeous tapestry,--some rich Venetian rendering of a medieval _ballade du temps jadis_; then Venice itself opens before us, all moving life and colour, under the enchantment of Schumann's _Carnival_, only to resolve itself into a vaster pageant of the world, with its mighty fanes of art and science, which, seemingly "fixed as fate, not fairy-work," yet "tremblingly grew blank From bright, then broke afresh in triumph,--ah, but sank As soon, for liquid change through artery and vein O' the very marble wound its way."