nothing given in our experience affords
a stable truth--that the black or white of one moment is always the
darker or lighter grey of another--Ferishtah refers his disciples to the
will of God. Our very scheme of goodness is a fiction, which man the
impotent cannot, God the all-powerful does not, convert into reality.
But it is a fiction created by God within the human mind, that it may
work for truth there; so also is it with the fictitious conceptions
which blend the qualities of man with those of God. To the objection

"A power, confessed past knowledge, nay, past thought,
--Thus thought and known!" (vol. xvi. p. 84.)

Ferishtah replies that to know the power by its operation, is all we
_need_ in the case of a human benefactor or lord: all we _can_ in the
case of those natural forces which we recognize in every act of our
life. And when reminded that the sense of indebtedness implies a
debtor--one ready to receive his due: and that we need look no farther
for the recipient than the great men who have benefited our race: his
answer is, that such gratitude to his fellow-men would be gratitude to
himself, in whose perception half their greatness lies. "He might as
well thank the starlight for the impressions of colour, which have been
supplied by his own brain."

The Lyric disclaims, in the name of one of the world's workers, all
excessive--_i.e._, loving recognition of his work. The speaker has not
striven for the world's sake, nor sought his ideals there. "Those who
have done so may claim its love. For himself he asks only a just
judgment on what he has achieved."

Mr. Browning here expresses for the first time his feeling towards the
"Religion of Humanity;" and though this was more or less to be inferred
from his general religious views, it affords, as now stated, a new, as
well as valuable, illustration of them. The Theistic philosophy which
makes the individual the centre of the universe, is, perhaps, nowhere in
his works, so distinctly set forth as in this latest of them. But
nowhere either has he more distinctly declared that the fullest
realization of the individual life is self-sacrifice.

"Renounce joy for my fellows sake? That's joy
Beyond joy;"
(_Two Camels_, vol. xvi p. 50.)

The lyrical supplement to Fancy 12 somewhat obscures the idea on which
it turns, by presenting it from a different point of view. But here, as
in the remainder of the