ere proportion and harmony are of more importance than casual
exfoliations of beauty, yet to a certain extent they do serve as musical
keys that give the fundamental tone. One certainly would have to search
in vain to find in the Croisic poem such lines as

"Five short days, scarce enough to
Bronze the clustered wilding apple, redden ripe the mountain ash."

Or these of Mont Blanc, seen at sunset, towering over icy pinnacles and
teeth-like peaks,

"Blanc, supreme above his earth-brood, needles red and white and green,
Horns of silver, fangs of crystal set on edge in his demesne."

Or, again, this of the sun swinging himself above the dark shoulder of
Jura--

"Gay he hails her, and magnific, thrilled her black length burns to
gold."

Or, finally, this sounding verse--

"Past the city's congregated peace of homes and pomp of spires."

The other poems later than "The Ring and the Book" are, broadly
speaking, of two kinds. On the one side may be ranged the groups which
really cohere with "Men and Women." These are "The Inn Album," the
miscellaneous poems of the "Pacchiarotto" volume, the "Dramatic Idyls,"
some of "Jocoseria," and some of "Asolando." "Ferishtah's Fancies" and
"Parleyings" are not, collectively, dramatic poems, but poems of
illuminative insight guided by a dramatic imagination.[23] They, and the
classical poems and translations (renderings, rather, by one whose own
individuality dominates them to the exclusion of that _nearness_ of the
original author, which it should be the primary aim of the translator to
evoke), the beautiful "Balaustion's Adventure," "Aristophanes' Apology,"
and "The Agamemnon of Aeschylus," and the third group, which comprises
"Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau," "Red Cotton Nightcap Country," and
"Fifine at the Fair"--these three groups are of the second kind.

[Footnote 23: In a letter to a friend, Browning wrote:--"I hope and
believe that one or two careful readings of the Poem [Ferishtah's
Fancies] will make its sense clear enough. Above all, pray allow for the
Poet's inventiveness in any case, and do not suppose there is more than
a thin disguise of a few Persian names and allusions. There was no such
person as Ferishtah--the stories are all inventions. ... The Hebrew
quotations are put in for a purpose, as a direct acknowledgment that
certain doctrines may be found in the Old Book, which the Concocters of
Novel Schemes of Morality put for