THE GREEKS AND BROWNING 409 
Browning in his earlier and later poems insists that although 
work we must, the motives should be Truth and Duty, never 
gain. The soft voice whispered, “Wilt thou adventure for 
my sake and man’s apart from all reward?” 
“‘Why from the world,’ Ferishtah smiled, ‘should thanks 
Go to this work of mine? . . . Justice says: 
Be just to fact, or blaming or approving: 
But — generous? No, nor loving! 
“Loving! what claim to love has work of mine? 
Concede my life were emptied of its gains 
To furnish forth and fill work’s strict confine, 
Who works so for the world’s sake — he complains 
With cause when hate, not love, rewards his pains. 
I looked beyond the world for truth and beauty: 
Sought, found, and did my duty.” 
The impress of Platonic thought concerning truth and 
ideality are apparent in passages of “Pauline” and “Para¬ 
celsus.” Indeed the impression is not lost in other poems 
running with the poet’s advancing years, and such thoughts 
are sprinkled as gems through “Asolando.” 
Plato tells us that the kind of rhetoric a wise man should 
concern himself with is truthful speaking and the cautious 
defining of words. Words are misleading, and the utmost 
care must be observed in the rightful appropriation of names. 
Flimsy word architecture of gaudy structure is not for 
Browning’s ideal city. He warns us that “words are but words 
and wind, why let the wind sing in your ear, bite sounding to 
your brain?” Not from names but from their essences we must 
really learn of things. Phaedrus is bid to go and tell Lysias 
and other composers of speeches — Homer, and other writers 
of poems, Solon and others who compose political discourses 
called laws — he is bid to say to all of them if their compo¬ 
sitions are based on knowledge of the Truth, and they can 
defend or prove them, then they are to be called not only 
poets, orators, legislators, but they are worthy of a higher 
name: they are lovers of wisdom or philosophers. This worthy 
name of lover of wisdom and philosopher is Robert Browning’s, 
