And a mood of serene acquiescence in keeping with the scene breathes from the poem which occupied him during this pleasant summer.  To Browning’s old age, as to Goethe’s, the calm wisdom and graceful symbolism of Persia offered a peculiar attraction.  In the Westoestlicher Divan, seventy years earlier, Goethe, with a subtler sympathy, laid his finger upon the common germs of Eastern and Western thought and poetry.  Browning, far less in actual touch with the Oriental mind, turned to the East in quest of picturesque habiliments for his very definitely European convictions—­“Persian garments,” which had to be “changed” in the mind of the interpreting reader.

The Fancies have the virtues of good fables,—­pithy wisdom, ingenious moral instances, homely illustrations, easy colloquial dialogue; and the ethical teaching has a striking superficial likeness to the common-sense morality of prudence and content, which fables, like proverbs, habitually expound.  “Cultivate your garden, don’t trouble your head about insoluble riddles, accept your ignorance and your limitations, assume your good to be good and your evil to be evil, be a man and nothing more”—­such is the recurring burden of Ferishtah’s counsel.  But such preaching on Browning’s lips always carried with it an implicit assumption that the preacher had himself somehow got outside the human limitations he insisted on; that he could measure the plausibility of man’s metaphysics and theology, and distinguish between the anthropomorphism which is to be acquiesced in because we know no better, and that which is to be spurned because we know too much.  Ferishtah’s thought is a game of hide-and-seek, and its movements have all the dexterity of winding and subterfuge proper to success in that game.  Against the vindictive God of the creeds he trusts his human assurance that pain is God’s instrument to educate us into pity and love; but when it is asked how a just God can single out sundry fellow-mortals

     “To undergo experience for our sake,
      Just that the gift of pain, bestowed on them,
      In us might temper to the due degree
      Joy’s else-excessive largess,”—­

instead of admitting a like appeal to the same human assurance, he falls back upon the unfathomable ways of Omnipotence.  If the rifts in the argument are in any sense supplied, it is by the brief snatches of song which intervene between the Fancies, as the cicada-note filled the pauses of the broken string.  These exquisite lyrics are much more adequate expressions of Browning’s faith than the dialogues which professedly embody it.  They transfer the discussion from the jangle of the schools and the cavils of the market-place to the passionate persuasions of the heart and the intimate experiences of love, in which all Browning’s mysticism had its root.  Thus Ferishtah’s pragmatic, almost philistine, doctrine of “Plot-culture,” by which human life is peremptorily walled in within