orks, and declared the children
of God to be exempt from the necessity of performing them; absolved from
doing right, because unable to do wrong; because no sin would be
accounted to them as such. Some authorities contend that he personally
rejected only the Mosaic, not the moral law; but Mr. Browning has
credited him with the full measure of Antinomian belief, and makes him
specially exult in the Divine assurance that the concentrated venom of
the worst committed sins can only work in him for salvation. He also
comments wonderingly on the state of the virtuous man and woman, and of
the blameless child, "undone," as he was saved, before the world began;
whose very striving is turned to sin; whose life-long prayer and
sacrifice can only end in damnation. But, as he declares, he praises God
the more that he cannot understand Him; that His ways are inscrutable,
that His love may not be bought.

"CONFESSIONS" is the answer of a dying man to the clergyman's question:
does he "view the world as a vale of tears?" His fancy is living through
a romance of past days, of which the scene comes back to him in the
arrangement of physic-bottles on a table beside him, while the curtain,
which may be green, but to his dying eyes is blue, makes the June
weather about it all. He is seeing the girl he loved, as watching for
him from a terrace near the stopper of that last and tallest bottle in
the row; and he is retracing the path by which he could creep, unseen by
any eyes but hers, to the "rose-wreathed" gate which was their
trysting-place. "No, reverend sir," is the first and last word of his
reply, "the world has been no vale of tears to me."

"MAY AND DEATH" expresses a mourner's wish, so natural to the egotism of
a deep sorrow, that the season which robbed him of his friend's life
should bury all its sweetness with him. The speaker retracts this wish,
in justice to the many pairs of friends who have each their right to
happiness. But there is, he says, one red-streaked plant which their May
might spare, since one wood alone would miss it. For its leaf is dashed
as with the blood of Spring; and whenever henceforth it grows in that
same place, the drop will have been drawn from his heart.[97]

"YOUTH AND ART" is a humorous, but regretful reminiscence of "Bohemian"
days, addressed by a great singer to a sculptor, also famous, who once
worked in a garret opposite to her own. They were young then, as well as
poor and obscure; and