a moment of terror
acknowledges that her dignified reserve was the cloak of passion, and
Eve acknowledges that her profession of love was transferred to the
wrong man; both ladies recover their self-possession and resume their
make-believe decorums, and Adam, like a gallant gentleman, will not see
through what is transparent. These are harmless jests at the ironies of
life. Browning's best gifts in this volume, that looks pale beside its
predecessors, are one or two short lyrics of love, which continue the
series of his latest lyrical poems, begun in the exquisite prologue to
_La Saisiaz_ and the graceful epilogue to _The Two Poets of Croisic_,
and continued in the songs of _Ferishtah's Fancies_ and _Asolando_--not
the least valuable part of the work of his elder years. His strength in
this volume of 1883 is put into that protest of human righteousness
against immoral conceptions of the Deity uttered by Ixion from his wheel
of torture. Rather than obey an immoral supreme Power, as John Stuart
Mill put it, "to Hell I will go"--and such is the cry of Browning's
victim of Zeus. He is aware that in his recognition of righteousness he
is himself superior to the evil god who afflicts him; and as this
righteousness is a moral quality, and no creation of his own
consciousness but rather imposed upon it as an eternal law, he rises
past Zeus to the Potency above him, after which even the undeveloped
sense of a Caliban blindly felt when he discovered a Quiet above the
bitter god Setebos; but the Quiet of Caliban is a negation of those evil
attributes of the supreme Being, which he reflects upwards from his own
gross heart, not the energy of righteousness which Ixion demands in his
transcendent "Potency." Into this poem went the energy of Browning's
heart and imagination; some of his matured wisdom entered into _Jochanan
Hakkadosh_, of which, however, the contents are insufficient to sustain
the length. The saint and sage of Israel has at the close of his life
found no solution of the riddle of existence. Lover, bard, soldier,
statist, he has obtained in each of his careers only doubts and
dissatisfaction. Twelve months added to a long life by the generosity of
his admirers, each of whom surrenders a fragment of his own life to
prolong that of the saint, bring him no clearer illumination--still all
is vanity and vexation of spirit. Only at the last, when by some
unexpected chance, a final opportunity of surveying the past and
antici