its narrow round of tasks, “minuteness severed from immensity,” is followed by the lyric which tells how Love transcends those limits, making an eternity of time and a universe of solitude.  Finally, the burden of these wayward intermittent strains of love-music is caught up, with an added intensity drawn from the poet’s personal love and sorrow, in the noble Epilogue.  As he listens to the call of Love, the world becomes an enchanted place, resounding with the triumph of good and the exultant battle-joy of heroes.  But a “chill wind” suddenly disencharms the enchantment, a doubt that buoyant faith might be a mirage conjured up by Love itself:—­

                “What if all be error,
      If the halo irised round my head were—­Love, thine arms?”

He disdains to answer; for the last words glow with a fire which of itself dispels the chill wind.  A faith founded upon love had for Browning a surer guarantee than any founded upon reason; it was secured by that which most nearly emancipated men from the illusions of mortality, and enabled them to see things as they are seen by God.

The Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day (1887) is a more laboured and, save for one or two splendid episodes, a less remarkable achievement than Ferishtah.  All the burly diffuseness which had there been held in check by a quasi-oriental ideal of lightly-knit facility and bland oracular pithiness, here has its way without stint, and no more songs break like the rush of birds’ wings upon the dusty air of colloquy.  Thrusting in between the lyrics of Ferishtah and Asolando, these Parleyings recall those other “people of importance” whose intrusive visit broke in upon “the tenderness of Dante.”  Neither their importance in their own day nor their relative obscurity, for the most part, in ours, had much to do with Browning’s choice.  They do not illustrate merely his normal interest in the obscure freaks and out-of-the-way anomalies of history.  The doings of these “people” had once been “important” to Browning himself, and the old man’s memory summoned up these forgotten old-world friends of his boyhood to be championed or rallied by their quondam disciple.  The death of the dearest friend of his later life, J. Milsand, in 1886, probably set these chords vibrating; the book is dedicated to his memory.  Perhaps the Imaginary Conversations of an older friend and master of Browning’s, one even more important in Browning’s day and in ours than in his own, and the master of his youth, once more suggested the scheme.  But these Parleyings are conversations only in name.  They are not even monologues of the old brilliantly dramatic kind.  All the dramatic zest of converse is gone, the personages are the merest shadows, nothing is seen but the old poet haranguing his puppets or putting voluble expositions of his own cherished dogmas into their wooden lips.  We have glimpses of the boy, when not yet able to compass