Another change takes place:  one felt more easily than defined; and he becomes aware that he is looking not on Venice, but on the world, and that what seemed her Carnival is in reality the masquerade of life.  The change goes on.  Halls and temples are transformed beneath his gaze.  The systems which they represent:  religions, philosophies, moralities, and theories of art, collapse before him, re-form and collapse again.  He sees that the deepest truth can only build on sand, though itself is stationed on a rock; and can only assert its substance in the often changing forms of error.  The vision seems to declare that change is the Law of Life.

“Not so,” it was about to say.  “That law is permanence.”  The scene has resembled the forming and reforming, the blending and melting asunder of a pile of sunset clouds.  Like these, when the sun has set, it is subsiding into a fixed repose, a stern and colourless uniformity.  Temple, tower, and dwelling-house assume the form of one solitary granite pile, a Druid monument.  This monument, as Mr. Browning describes it,[54] consists really of two, so standing or lying as to form part of each other.  The one cross-shaped is supposed to have been sepulchral, or in some other way sacred to death.  The latter, on which he mainly dwells, was, until lately, the centre of a rude nature-worship, and is therefore consecrated to life.  It symbolizes life in its most active and most perennial form.  It means the force which aspires to heaven, and the strength which is rooted in the earth.  It means that impulse of all being towards something outside itself, which is constant amidst all change, uniform amidst all variety.  It means the last word of the scheme of creation, and therefore also the first.  It repeats and concludes the utterance already sounding in the spectator’s ear:—­

“...  ‘All’s change, but permanence as well.’ 
—­Grave note whence—­list aloft!—­harmonics sound, that mean: 
Truth inside, and outside, truth also; and between
Each, falsehood that is change, as truth is permanence. 
The individual soul works through the shows of sense,
(Which, ever proving false, still promise to be true)
Up to an outer soul as individual too;
And, through the fleeting, lives to die into the fixed,
And reach at length ‘God, man, or both together mixed,’"[55]

          
                                                                          (p. 332.)

The condition of this monument, its history, the conjectures to which it has given rise, are described in a humorous spirit which belies its mystic significance; but that significance is imbedded in the very conception of the poem, and distinctly expressed in the author’s subsequent words.  The words which I have just quoted contain the whole philosophy of “Fifine at the Fair” as viewed on its metaphysical side.  They declare the changing relations of the soul to some fixed eternal truth foreshadowed in the impulses of sense.  They are the burden of Don Juan’s argument even when he is defending what is wrong.  They are the constantly recurring keynote of what the author has meant to say.