When the time arrives for a beatific vision Blougram will be ready to adapt himself to the new state of things. Is not the best pledge of his capacity for future adaptation to a new environment this—that being in the world he is worldly? We must not lose the training of each successive stage of evolution by for ever projecting ourselves half way into the next. So rolls on the argument to its triumphant conclusion—
Fool or knave?
Why needs a bishop be a fool or knave
When there's a thousand diamond weights between?
Only at the last, were it not that we know that there is a firmer ground for Blougram than this on which he takes his stand in after-dinner controversy, we might be inclined to close the subject by adapting to its uses the title of a pamphlet connected with the Kingsley and Newman debate—"But was not Mr Gigadibs right after all?" Worsted in sword-play he certainly was; but the soul may have its say, and the soul, armed with its instincts of truth, is a formidable challenger.
NOTES:
Letters of R.B. and E.B.B., i. 388.
Mrs Orr's Handbook to Browning's Works, 266, note. For the horse, see stanzas xiii. xiv. of the poem.
This poem is sometimes expounded as a sigh for the infinite, which no human love can satisfy. But the simpler conception of it as expressing a love almost but not altogether complete seems the truer.