—Grave note whence—list aloft!—harmonics sound, that mean:
Truth inside, and outside, truth also; and between
Each, falsehood that is change, as truth is permanence.
The individual soul works through the shows of sense,
(Which, ever proving false, still promise to be true)
Up to an outer soul as individual too;
And, through the fleeting, lives to die into the fixed,
And reach at length 'God, man, or both together mixed,'"[[55]]
The condition of this monument, its history, the conjectures to which it has given rise, are described in a humorous spirit which belies its mystic significance; but that significance is imbedded in the very conception of the poem, and distinctly expressed in the author's subsequent words. The words which I have just quoted contain the whole philosophy of "Fifine at the Fair" as viewed on its metaphysical side. They declare the changing relations of the soul to some fixed eternal truth foreshadowed in the impulses of sense. They are the burden of Don Juan's argument even when he is defending what is wrong. They are the constantly recurring keynote of what the author has meant to say.
Don Juan draws also a new and more moral lesson from this final vision of his dream. "Inconstancy is not justified by natural law, for it means unripeness of soul. The ripe soul evolves the Infinite from a fixed point. It finds the many in the one. Elvire is the one who includes the many. Elvire is the ocean: while Fifine is but the foam-flake which the ocean can multiply at pleasure. Elvire shall henceforth suffice to him."