Joy for Browning means praise and gratitude; and in recognising the occasions for such praise and thanks let us not wind ourselves too high.  Let us praise God for the little things that are so considerately fitted to our little human wants and desires.  The morning-stars will sing together without our help; if we must choose our moment for a Te Deum, let it be when we have enjoyed our plate of cherries.  The glorious lamp in the Shah’s pavilion lightens other eyes than mine; but to think that the Shah’s goodness has provided slippers for my feet in my own small chamber, and of the very colour that I most affect!  Nor, in returning thanks, should it cause us trouble that our best thanks are poor, or even that they are mingled with an alloy of earthly regards, “mere man’s motives—­”

    Alas, Friend, what was free from this alloy,—­
    Some smatch thereof,—­in best and purest love
    Preferred thy earthly father?  Dust thou art,
    Dust shall be to the end.

Our little human pleasures—­do they seem unworthy to meet the eye of God?  That is a question put by distrust and spiritual pride.  God gives each of us His little plot, within which each of us is master.  The question is not what compost, what manure, makes fruitful the soil; we need not report to the Lord of the soil the history of our manures; let us treat the ground as seems best, if only we bring sacks to His granary in autumn.  Nay, do not I also tickle the palate of my ass with a thistle-bunch, so heartening him to do his work?

In A Pillar at Sebzevah, Ferishtah-Browning confronts the objection that he has deposed knowledge and degraded humanity to the rank of an ass whose highest attainment is to love—­what?  “Husked lupines, and belike the feeder’s self.”  The Dervish declares without shrinking the faith that is in him:—­

    “Friend,” quoth Ferishtah, “all I seem to know
    Is—­I know nothing save that love I can
    Boundlessly, endlessly.”

[Illustration]

If there be knowledge it shall vanish away; but charity never faileth.  As for knowledge, the prize is in the process; as gain we must mistrust it, not as a road to gain:—­

     Knowledge means
    Ever-renewed assurance by defeat
    That victory is somehow still to reach,
    But love is victory, the prize itself.

Grasping at the sun, a child captures an orange:  what if he were to scorn his capture and refuse to suck its juice?  The curse of life is this—­that every supposed accession to knowledge, every novel theory, is accepted as a complete solution of the whole problem, while every pleasure is despised as transitory or insubstantial.  In truth the drop of water found in the desert sand is infinitely precious; the mirage is only a mirage.  Browning, who in this volume puts forth his own doctrine of theism, his justification of prayer, his belief in a superintending providence, his explanation of the presence of evil