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!'" 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.