ion is as good as reality; and
Heaven itself can only be made up of such things as poets dream. Yet he
knows that his swimming seems but a foolish compromise between the
flight to which he cannot attain, and the more grovelling mode of being
which he has no real wish to renounce; and he wonders whether she, the
already released, who is upborne by those sunlit wings, does not look
down with pity and wonder upon him. So also will Elvire, though less
dispassionately, watch the intellectual vagaries of her Don Juan, which
embrace the heavens, but are always centred in earth. This prologue is
preceded by a quotation from Moliere's "Don Juan," in which Elvire
satirically prescribes to her lover the kind of self-defence--or
something not unlike it--which Mr. Browning's hero will adopt.

Don Juan invites his wife to walk with him through the fair: and as he
points out its sights to her, he expatiates on the pleasures of
vagrancy, and declares that the red pennon waving on the top of the
principal booth sends an answering thrill of restlessness through his
own frame. He then passes to a glowing eulogium on the charms of the
dark-skinned rope-dancer, Fifine, who forms part of the itinerant show.

Elvire gives tokens of perturbation, and her husband frankly owns that
as far as Fifine is concerned, he cannot defend his taste: he can
scarcely account for it. "Beautiful she is, in her feminine grace and
strength, set forth by her boyish dress; but with probably no more
feeling than a sprite, and no more conscience than a flower. It is
likely enough that her antecedents have been execrable, and that her
life is in harmony with them." Still, he does not wish it supposed that
he admires a body without a soul: and he tries to convince himself that
Fifine, after all, is not quite without one. "There is no grain of sand
on the sea-shore which may not, once in a century, be the first to
flash back the rising sun; there can be no human spirit which does not
in the course of its existence greet the Divine light with one answering
ray."

But no heavenly spark can be detected in Fifine; and he is reduced to
seeking a virtue for her, a justification for himself, in that very
fact. If she has no virtue, she also pretends to none. If she gives
nothing to society, she asks nothing of it. His fancy raises up a
procession of such women as the world has crowned: a Helen, a Cleopatra,
some Christian saint; he bids Elvire see herself as part of it--as