“Framework which waits for a picture to frame, ... 
      Roses embowering with nought they embower.”

Browning, the poet of the divining imagination, is less apparent here than the astute ironical observer who delights in pricking the bubbles of affectation, stripping off the masks of sham, and exhibiting human nature in unadorned nakedness. Donald is an exposure, savage and ugly, of savagery and ugliness in Sport; Solomon and Balkis a reduction, dainty and gay, of these fabled paragons of wisdom to the dimensions of ordinary vain and amorous humanity.  Lilith and Eve unmask themselves under stress of terror, as Balkis and Solomon at the compulsion of the magic ring, and Adam urbanely replaces the mask.  Jochanan Hakka-dosh, the saintly prop of Israel, expounds from his deathbed a gospel of struggle and endurance in which a troubled echo of the great strain of Ben Ezra may no doubt be heard; but his career is, as a whole, a half-sad, half-humorous commentary on the vainness of striving to extend the iron frontiers of mortality.  Lover, poet, soldier, statist have each contributed a part of their lives to prolong and enrich the saint’s:  but their fresh idealisms have withered when grafted upon his sober and sapless brain; while his own garnered wisdom fares no better when committed to the crude enthusiasm of his disciples.  But twice, in this volume, a richer and fuller music sounds.  In the great poem of Ixion, human illusions are still the preoccupying thought; but they appear as fetters, not as specious masks, and instead of the serio-comic exposure of humanity we see its tragic and heroic deliverance.  Ixion is Browning’s Prometheus.  The song that breaks from his lips as he whirls upon the penal wheel of Zeus is a great liberating cry of defiance to the phantom-god—­man’s creature and his ape—­who may plunge the body in torments but can never so baffle the soul but that

     “From the tears and sweat and blood of his torment
      Out of the wreck he rises past Zeus to the Potency o’er him,
      Pallid birth of my pain—­where light, where light is, aspiring,
      Thither I rise, whilst thou—­Zeus take thy godship and sink.”

And in Never the Time and the Place, the pang of love’s aching void and the rapture of reunion blend in one strain of haunting magical beauty, the song of an old man in whom one memory kindles eternal youth, a song in which, as in hardly another, the wistfulness of autumn blends with the plenitude of spring.

Browning spent the summer months of 1883 at Gressoney St Jean, a lonely spot high up in the Val d’Aosta, living, as usual when abroad, on the plainest of vegetable diet.  “Delightful Gressoney!” he wrote,

     “Who laughest, ‘Take what is, trust what may be!’”