This is reason swallowed up in rhyme, or sense lost in sentiment. Why is the incoherent, instinctive exclamations of childhood, of bird and beast, sweeter than the ripened, rational, progressive, word of man? Surely a bird is more innocent than a man, but a stone is even more innocent than a bird. The beast tears its victims to death, the tree feeds the worms; is not a tree, therefore, purer than a beast? In all nature, there is nothing holier than man, for he alone can be holy. Browning seems to think that we were all so much better off when we were nearer the bird and beast, but evolution is our destiny, and only faint hearts cast wistful glances at the ages left behind. Finally, the great English poet seems to develop further the Asiatic fatalism of "God's in His Heaven, all's right with the world" idea, when in Scene VI., Pippa, in her chamber, exclaims: ```"_All service ranks the same with God-- ```With God, whose puppets, best and worst, ```Are we; there is no last, nor first._"= Indeed! Are we, then, but his puppets'? Is God a puppet showman? And is this a puppet world which he rules? What is the educational value to God of presiding over a race of puppets? Is there any glory for God, as Omar Khayyam suggests, in pushing back and forth, on a checkerboard, mere puppets, and then shutting them up in a closet after he has finished with the game? If we are all his puppets, we cannot much care whether "God's in His Heaven", or somewhere else, and whether or not "All's right with the world." The truth is, Browning, instead of portraying truth, betrays it. He sacrifices reason to imagination, and the result is failure.