chiefly feared the first of these two dangers, and even while pointing out, as in Paracelsus, the errors of the seeker for absolute knowledge or for absolute love, he had felt a certain sympathy with such glorious transgressors.  He had valued more than any positive acquisitions of knowledge those “grasps of guess, which pull the more into the less.”  Now such guesses, such hopes were as precious to him as ever, but he set more store than formerly by the certainties—­certainties even if illusions—­of the general heart of man.  These are the forms of thought and feeling divinely imposed upon us; we cannot do better than to accept them; but we must accept them only as provisional, as part of our education on earth, as a needful rung of the ladder by which we may climb to higher things.  And the faith which leads to such acquiescence also results in the acceptance of hopes as things not be struggled for but rested in as a substantial portion of the divine order of our lives.  In autumn come for spirits rightly attuned these pellucid halcyon days of the Indian summer.

In Jocoseria, which appeared in Browning’s seventy-first year (1883), he shows nothing of his boisterous humour, but smiles at our human infirmities from the heights of experience.  The prop of Israel, the much-enlightened master, “Eximious Jochanan Ben Sabbathai,” when his last hour is at hand has to confess that all his wisdom of life lies in his theoric; in practice he is still an infant; striving presumptuously in boyhood to live an angel, now that he comes to die he is hardly a man.  And Solomon himself is no more than man; the truth-compelling ring extorts the confession that an itch of vanity still tickles and teazes him; the Queen of Sheba, seeker for wisdom and patroness of culture, after all likes wisdom best when its exponents are young men tall and proper, and prefers to the solution of the riddles of life by elderly monarchs one small kiss from a fool.  Lilith in a moment of terror acknowledges that her dignified reserve was the cloak of passion, and Eve acknowledges that her profession of love was transferred to the wrong man; both ladies recover their self-possession and resume their make-believe decorums, and Adam, like a gallant gentleman, will not see through what is transparent.  These are harmless jests at the ironies of life.  Browning’s best gifts in this volume, that looks pale beside its predecessors, are one or two short lyrics of love, which continue the series of his latest lyrical poems, begun in the exquisite prologue to La Saisiaz and the graceful epilogue to The Two Poets of Croisic, and continued in the songs of Ferishtah’s Fancies and Asolando—­not the least valuable part of the work of his elder years.  His strength in this volume of 1883 is put into that protest of human righteousness against immoral conceptions of the Deity uttered by Ixion from his wheel of torture.  Rather than obey an immoral supreme Power, as John