Digest these, and I praise your peptics' state,
Nothing found wrong there."
Similarly Sa' di says "Yet will men of light and learning, from whom the true countenance of a discourse is not concealed, be well aware that herein the pearls of good counsel which heal are threaded on strings of right sense; that the bitter physic of admonition is constantly mingled with the honey of good humor, so that the spirits of listeners grow not sad, and that they remain not exempt from blessings of acceptance."
A further interest attaches to these lyrics because they form a series of emotional phases in the soul-life of two lovers whom I think, we may be justified in regarding as Mr. and Mrs. Browning themselves. I always think of them as companion pictures to 'The Sonnets from the Portuguese.' In these the sun-rise of a great love is portrayed with intense and exalted passion while the lyrics in 'Ferishtah's Fancies' reflect the subsequent development of such a love, through the awakening of whole new realms of feeling, wherein love for humanity is enlarged, criticism from the one beloved, welcome; all the little trials of life dissolved in the new light; and divine love realized with a force never before possible. Do we not see a living portrait of the two poets in the lyric 'So the head aches and the limbs are faint'? Many a hint may be found in their letters to prove that Mrs. Browning with just such a frail body possessed a fire of spirit that carried her constantly toward attainment while he, with all the vigor of splendid health could with truth have frequently said "In the soul of me sits sluggishness." These exquisite lyrics which, whether they conform to Elizabethan models or not, are as fine as anything ever done in that line, are crowned by the epilogue in which we hear the stricken husband crying out to her whom twenty years earlier he had called his "lyric love" in a voice doubting, yet triumphing in the thought that his optimism is the light radiating from the halo which her human love had irised round his head.
In 'The Parleyings' the discussions turn principally upon artistic problems and their relation to modern philosophy, four out of the seven being inspired by artist, poet, or musician. The forgotten worthies whom Browning rescued from oblivion, make their appeal to him upon various grounds that connect them with the present. Bernard de Mandeville evidently caught Browning's fancy because in his satirical poem 'The Grumbling Hive' he forestalled, by a defence of the Duke of Marlborough's war policy, the doctrine of the relativity of good and evil. One might have imagined that this subject had been exhausted in 'Ferishtah's Fancies,' but it seems to have had a great fascination for Browning, probably because the idea was a new one and he felt the need of thinking his way through all its implications. Fresh interest is added in this case because the objector in the argument was a contemporary of Browning's--Carlyle, whose well-known pessimism over the existence of evil is graphically presented. Browning clenches his side of the argument with an original and daring variation upon the Prometheus myth led up to by one of the most magnificent passages in the whole range of his poetry, and probably the finest example anywhere in literature of a description of nature as interpreted by the laws of cosmic evolution. He describes the effect of the sun-light in developing the life upon the earth, tracing it as far as the mind of man. But the mind of man is not satisfied with the purely physical and phenomenal.
"What avails sun's earth-felt thrill
To me? Mind seeks to see,
Touch, understand, by mind inside me,
The outside mind--whose quickening I attain
To recognize--I only."