Jocoseria has poems of a higher quality, some of which, like the lovely Never the Time and Place, I have been already quoted. Ixion is too obscurely put to attain its end with the general public.  But it may be recommended, though vainly, to those theologians who, hungry for the Divine Right of torture, build their God, like Caliban, out of their own minds; who, foolish enough to believe that the everlasting endurance of evil is a necessary guarantee of the everlasting endurance of good, are still bold and bad enough to proclaim the abominable lie of eternal punishment.  They need that spirit the little child whom Christ placed in the midst of his disciples; and in gaining which, after living the life of the lover, the warrior, the poet, the statesman, Jochanan Hakkadosh found absolute peace and joy.  Few poems contain more of Browning’s matured theory of life than this of the Jewish Rabbi; and its seriousness is happily mingled with imaginative illustrations and with racy wit.  The sketch of Tsaddik, who puts us in mind of Wagner in the Faust, is done with a sarcastic joy in exposing the Philistine, and with a delight in its own cleverness which is fascinating.

Ferishtah’s Fancies and Parleyings with Certain People followed Jocoseria in 1884 and 1887.  The first of these books is much the better of the two.  A certain touch of romance is given by the Dervish, by the Fables with which he illustrates his teaching, and by the Eastern surroundings.  Some of the stories are well told, and their scenery is truthfully wrought and in good colour.  The subjects are partly theological, with always a reference to human life; and partly of the affections and their working.  It is natural to a poet, and delightful in Browning, to find him in his old age dwelling from poem to poem on the pre-eminence of love, on love as the ultimate judge of all questions.  He asserts this again and again; with the greatest force in A Pillar at Sebzevar, and, more lightly, in Cherries.  Yet, and this is a pity, he is not satisfied with the decision of love, but spends pages in argumentative discussions which lead him away from that poetical treatment of the subjects which love alone, as the master, would have enabled him to give.  However, the treatment that love gives we find in the lyrics at the end of each Fancy; and some of these lyrics are of such delicate and subtle beauty that I am tempted to think that they were written at an earlier period, and their Fancies composed to fit them.  If they were written now, it is plain that age had not disenabled him from walking with pleasure and power among those sweet, enamelled meadows of poetry in whose soil he now thought great poetry did not grow.  And when we read the lyrics, our regret is all the more deep that he chose the thorn-clad and desert lands, where barren argument goes round and round its subjects without ever finding the true path to their centre.