press in
poetry, all limitations of time and power are suspended; every moment's
realization is absolute and lasting."

10. "PLOT-CULTURE" is a distinct statement of the belief in a purely
personal relation between God and man. It justifies every experience
which bears moral fruit, however immoral from human points of view; and
refers both the individual and his critic to the final harvest, on which
alone the Divine judgment will be passed.

The Lyric repeats the image in which this idea is clothed, more directly
than the idea itself. A lover pleads permission to love with his whole
being--with Sense as well as with Soul.

11. "A PILLAR AT SEBZEVAR" lays down the proposition that the pursuit of
knowledge is invariably disappointing: while love is always, and in
itself, a gain.

The Lyric modifies this idea into the advocacy of a silent love: one
which reveals itself without declaration.

12. "A BEAN-STRIPE: ALSO APPLE-EATING" is a summary of Mr. Browning's
religious and practical beliefs. We cannot, it says, determine the
prevailing colour of any human life, though we have before us a balanced
record of its bright and dark days. For light or darkness is only
absolute in so far as the human spirit can isolate or, as it were, stand
still within, it. Every living experience, actual or remembered, takes
something of its hue from those which precede or follow it: now catching
the reflection of the adjoining lights and shades; now brighter or
darker by contrast with them. The act of living fuses black and white
into grey; and as we grasp the melting whole in one backward glance, its
blackness strikes most on the sense of one man, its whiteness on that of
another.

Ferishtah admits that there are lives which seem to be, perhaps are,
stained with a black so deep that no intervening whiteness can affect
it; and he declares that this possibility of absolute human suffering is
a constant chastener to his own joys. But when called upon to reconcile
the avowed optimism of his views with the actual as well as sympathetic
experience of such suffering, he shows that he does not really believe
in it. One race, he argues, will flourish under conditions which another
would regard as incompatible with life; and the philosophers who most
cry down the value of life are sometimes the least willing to renounce
it. He cannot resist the conviction that the same compensating laws are
at work everywhere.

In explanation of the fact, that