But before all else Fifine at the Fair is a poem.  Of all the longer poems which followed The Ring and the Book it is the most sustained and the most diversified in imaginative power.  To point out passages of peculiar beauty, passages vivid in feeling, original in thought, would here be out of place; for the brilliance and vigour are unflagging, and what we have to complain of is the lack of some passages of repose.  The joy in freedom—­freedom accepting some hidden law—­of these poor losels and truants from convention, who stroll it and stage it, the gypsy figure of Fifine in page-costume, the procession of imagined beauties—­Helen, Cleopatra, the Saint of Pornic Church—­the half-emerging, half-undelivered statue by Michelagnolo, the praise of music as nearer to the soul than words, sunset at Saint-Marie, the play of the body in the sea at noontide (with all that it typifies), woman as the rillet leaping to the sea, woman as the dolphin that upbears Orion, the Venetian carnival, which is the carnival of human life, darkness fallen upon the plains, and through the darkness the Druidic stones gleaming—­all these are essentially parts of the texture of the poem, yet each has a lustre or a shimmer or grave splendour of its own.

It is strange that any reader should have supposed either the Prologue or the Epilogue to be uttered by the imaginary speaker of the poem.  Both shadow forth the personal feelings of Browning; the prologue tells of the gladness he still found both in the world of imagination and the world of reality, over which hovers the spirit that had once been so near his own, the spirit that is near him still, yet moving on a different plane, perhaps wondering at or pitying this life of his, which yet he accepts with cheer and will turn to the best account; the epilogue veils behind its grim humour the desolate feeling that came upon him again and again as a householder in this house of life, for behind the happiness which he strenuously maintained, there lay a great desolation.  But the last word of the epilogue—­“Love is all and Death is nought” is a word of sustainment wrung out of sorrow.  These poems have surely in them no “perplexing cynicism,” nor has the poem enclosed between them, when it is seen aright.  Browning’s idea in the poem he declared in reply to a question of Dr Furnivall, “was to show merely how a Don Juan might justify himself, partly by truth, somewhat by sophistry.”  No more unhappy misnomer than this “Don Juan” could have been devised for the curious, ingenious, learned experimenter in life, no man of pleasure, in the vulgar sense of the word, but a deliberate explorer of thoughts and things, who argues out his case with so much fine casuistry and often with the justest conceptions of human character and conduct.  If we could discover a dividing line between his truth and his sophistry, we might discover also that the poem is no exceptional work of Browning, for which an apology is required,