plunge the body in torments but can never so baffle the soul but that "From the tears and sweat and blood of his torment Out of the wreck he rises past Zeus to the Potency o'er him, Pallid birth of my pain--where light, where light is, aspiring, Thither I rise, whilst thou--Zeus take thy godship and sink." And in _Never the Time and the Place_, the pang of love's aching void and the rapture of reunion blend in one strain of haunting magical beauty, the song of an old man in whom one memory kindles eternal youth, a song in which, as in hardly another, the wistfulness of autumn blends with the plenitude of spring. Browning spent the summer months of 1883 at Gressoney St Jean, a lonely spot high up in the Val d'Aosta, living, as usual when abroad, on the plainest of vegetable diet. "Delightful Gressoney!" he wrote, "Who laughest, 'Take what is, trust what may be!'" And a mood of serene acquiescence in keeping with the scene breathes from the poem which occupied him during this pleasant summer. To Browning's old age, as to Goethe's, the calm wisdom and graceful symbolism of Persia offered a peculiar attraction. In the _Westöstlicher Divan_, seventy years earlier, Goethe, with a subtler sympathy, laid his finger upon the common germs of Eastern and Western thought and poetry. Browning, far less in actual touch with the Oriental mind, turned to the East in quest of picturesque habiliments for his very definitely European convictions--"Persian garments," which had to be "changed" in the mind of the interpreting reader. The _Fancies_ have the virtues of good fables,--pithy wisdom, ingenious moral instances, homely illustrations, easy colloquial dialogue; and the ethical teaching has a striking superficial likeness to the common-sense morality of prudence and content, which fables, like proverbs, habitually expound. "Cultivate your garden, don't trouble your head about insoluble riddles, accept your ignorance and your limitations, assume your good to be good and your evil to be evil, be a man and nothing more"--such is the recurring burden of Ferishtah's counsel. But such preaching on Browning's lips always carried with it an implicit assumption that the preacher had himself somehow got outside the human limitations he insisted on; that he could measure the plausibility of man's metaphysics and theology, and distinguish between the anthropomorphism which is to be acquiesced in because we know no better, and that which is to be spurned because we know too much. Ferishtah's thought is a game of hide-and-seek, and its movements have all the dexterity of winding and subterfuge proper to success in that game. Against the vindictive God of the creeds he trusts his human assurance that pain is God's instrument to educate us into pity and love; but when it is asked how a just God can single out sundry fellow-mortals