and instead
of the serio-comic exposure of humanity we see its tragic and heroic
deliverance. Ixion is Browning's Prometheus. The song that breaks from
his lips as he whirls upon the penal wheel of Zeus is a great liberating
cry of defiance to the phantom-god--man's creature and his ape--who may
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 _Westoestlicher
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