The first two fancies (The Eagle and The Melon-Seller) give the lessons which Ferishtah learnt, and which determined him to become a Dervish:  all the rest are his own lessons to others.  These deal severally with faith (Shah Abbas), prayer (The Family), the Incarnation (The Sun), the meaning of evil and of pain (Mihrab Shah), punishment present and future (A Camel-Driver), asceticism (Two Camels), gratefulness to God for small benefits (Cherries), the direct personal relation existing between man and God (Plot-Culture), the uncertain value of knowledge contrasted with the sure gain of love (A Pillar at Sebzevah), and, finally, in A Bean-Stripe:  also Apple Eating, the problem of life:  is it more good than evil, or more evil than good?  The work is a serious attempt to grapple with these great questions, and is as important on its ethical as on its artistic side.  Each argument is conveyed by means of a parable, often brilliant, often quaint, always striking and serviceable, and always expressed in scrupulously clear and simple language.  The teaching, put more plainly and definitely, perhaps, with less intellectual disguise than usual, is the old unconquered optimism which, in Browning, is so unmistakably a matter of temperament.

The most purely delightful poetry in the volume will be found in the delicate and musical love-songs which brighten its pages.  They are snatches of spontaneous and exquisite song, bird-notes seldom heard except from the lips of youth.  Perhaps the most perfect is the first.

      “Round us the wild creatures, overhead the trees,
      Underfoot the moss-tracks,—­life and love with these! 
      I to wear a fawn-skin, thou to dress in flowers: 
      All the long lone Summer-day, that greenwood life of ours!

      Rich-pavilioned, rather,—­still the world without,—­
      Inside—­gold-roofed silk-walled silence round about! 
      Queen it thou in purple,—­I, at watch and ward
      Couched beneath the columns, gaze, thy slave, love’s guard!

      So, for us no world?  Let throngs press thee to me! 
      Up and down amid men, heart by heart fare we! 
      Welcome squalid vesture, harsh voice, hateful face! 
      God is soul, souls I and thou:  with souls should souls have place.”

“With souls should souls have place,” is, with Browning, the condensed expression of an experience, a philosophy, and an art.  Like the lovers of his lyric, he has renounced the selfish serenities of wild-wood and dream-palace; he has gone up and down among men, listening to that human music, and observing that human or divine comedy.  He has sung what he has heard, and he has painted what he has seen.  If it should be asked whether such work will live, there can be only one answer, and he has already given it: 

                                  “It lives,
      If precious be the soul of man to man.”