gain:--

Knowledge means
Ever-renewed assurance by defeat
That victory is somehow still to reach,
But love is victory, the prize itself.

Grasping at the sun, a child captures an orange: what if he were to
scorn his capture and refuse to suck its juice? The curse of life is
this--that every supposed accession to knowledge, every novel theory, is
accepted as a complete solution of the whole problem, while every
pleasure is despised as transitory or insubstantial. In truth the drop
of water found in the desert sand is infinitely precious; the mirage is
only a mirage. Browning, who in this volume puts forth his own doctrine
of theism, his justification of prayer, his belief in a superintending
providence, his explanation of the presence of evil in the world, is, of
course, no Pyrrhonist. He profoundly distrusts the capacity of the
intellect, acting as a pure organ of speculation, to unriddle the
mysteries of existence; he maintains, on the other hand, that knowledge
sufficient for the conduct of our lives is involved in the simple
experiences of good and evil, of joy and sorrow. In reality Browning's
attitude towards truth approaches more nearly what has now begun to
style itself "Pragmatism" than it approaches Pyrrhonism; but
philosophers whose joy is to beat the air may find that it is
condemnatory of their methods.

In his distrust of metaphysical speculation and in regarding the
affections as superior to the intellect, Browning as a teacher has
something in common with Comte; but there is perhaps no creed so alien
to his nature as the creed of Positivism. The last of Ferishtah's
discourses is concerned with the proportion which happiness bears to
pain in the average life of man, or rather--for Browning is nothing if
he is not individualistic--in the life of each man as an individual. The
conclusion arrived at is that no "bean-stripe"--each bean, white or
black, standing for a day--is wholly black, and that the more extended
is our field of vision the more is the general aspect of the
"bean-stripe" of a colour intermediate between the extremes of darkness
and of light. Before the poem closes, Browning turns aside to consider
the Positivist position. Why give our thanks and praise for all the good
things of life to God, whose existence is an inference of the heart
derived from its own need of rendering gratitude to some Being like
ourselves? Are not these good things the gifts of the race, of Humanit