unable to do wrong; because no sin would be accounted to them as such.  Some authorities contend that he personally rejected only the Mosaic, not the moral law; but Mr. Browning has credited him with the full measure of Antinomian belief, and makes him specially exult in the Divine assurance that the concentrated venom of the worst committed sins can only work in him for salvation.  He also comments wonderingly on the state of the virtuous man and woman, and of the blameless child, “undone,” as he was saved, before the world began; whose very striving is turned to sin; whose life-long prayer and sacrifice can only end in damnation.  But, as he declares, he praises God the more that he cannot understand Him; that His ways are inscrutable, that His love may not be bought.

“CONFESSIONS” is the answer of a dying man to the clergyman’s question:  does he “view the world as a vale of tears?” His fancy is living through a romance of past days, of which the scene comes back to him in the arrangement of physic-bottles on a table beside him, while the curtain, which may be green, but to his dying eyes is blue, makes the June weather about it all.  He is seeing the girl he loved, as watching for him from a terrace near the stopper of that last and tallest bottle in the row; and he is retracing the path by which he could creep, unseen by any eyes but hers, to the “rose-wreathed” gate which was their trysting-place.  “No, reverend sir,” is the first and last word of his reply, “the world has been no vale of tears to me.”

“MAY AND DEATH” expresses a mourner’s wish, so natural to the egotism of a deep sorrow, that the season which robbed him of his friend’s life should bury all its sweetness with him.  The speaker retracts this wish, in justice to the many pairs of friends who have each their right to happiness.  But there is, he says, one red-streaked plant which their May might spare, since one wood alone would miss it.  For its leaf is dashed as with the blood of Spring; and whenever henceforth it grows in that same place, the drop will have been drawn from his heart.[97]

“YOUTH AND ART” is a humorous, but regretful reminiscence of “Bohemian” days, addressed by a great singer to a sculptor, also famous, who once worked in a garret opposite to her own.  They were young then, as well as poor and obscure; and they watched and coquetted with each other, though they neither spoke nor met; and perhaps played with the idea of a more serious courtship.  Caution and ambition, however, prevailed; and they have reached the summit of their respective professions, and accepted the social honours which the position insures.  But she thinks of all that might have been, if they had listened to nature, and cast in their lot with each other; of the sighs and the laughter, the starvation and the feasting, the despairs and the joys of the struggling artist’s career; and she feels that in its fullest and freest sense, their artist life has remained incomplete.