The “prestigious feat” of causing flowers to appear in winter was a common one.  “In the year 876, the Emperor Lewis then reigning, there was one Zedechias, by religion a Jew, by profession a physician, but indeed a magician.  In the midst of winter, in the Emperor’s palace, he suddenly caused a most pleasant and delightful garden to appear, with all sorts of trees, plants, herbs, and flowers, together with the singing of all sorts of birds, to be seen and heard.” (Delrio, “Disquisitio Magicae,” bk. i., chap, iv., and elsewhere; and many other authorities.)]

[Footnote 67:  “Wine of Cyprus.”  The quotation heading the poem qualifies it as ‘wine for the superiors in age and station.’]

[Footnote 68:  Such as Wordsworth assumed to have been in use with Shakespeare.]

[Footnote 69:  This is told in the tales of the Troubadours.]

[Footnote 70:  Published, simultaneously, in Mr. Fox’s “Monthly Repository.”  The song in “Pippa Passes” beginning “A king lived long ago,” and the verses introduced in “James Lee’s Wife,” were also first published in this Magazine, edited by the generous and very earliest encourager of Mr. Browning’s boyish attempts at poetry.]

[Footnote 71:  These verses were written when Mr. Browning was twenty-three.]

EMOTIONAL POEMS (CONTINUED).

RELIGIOUS, ARTISTIC, AND EXPRESSIVE OF THE FIERCER EMOTIONS.

The emotions which, after that of love, are most strongly represented in Mr. Browning’s works are the RELIGIOUS and the ARTISTIC:  emotions closely allied in every nature in which they happen to co-exist, and which are so in their proper degree in Mr. Browning’s; the proof of this being that two poems which I have placed in the Artistic group almost equally fit into the Religious.  But the religious poems impress us more by their beauty than by their number, if we limit it to those which are directly inspired by this particular emotion.  Religious questions have occupied, as we have seen, some of Mr. Browning’s most important reflective poems.  Religious belief forms the undercurrent of many of the emotional poems.  And it was natural therefore, that religious feeling should not often lay hold of him in a more exclusive form.  It does so only in three cases; those of

     “Saul.” ("Dramatic Lyrics.”  Published in part in “Dramatic
     Romances and Lyrics,” 1845; wholly, in “Men and Women,”
     1855.)

     “Epilogue.” ("Dramatis Personae.” 1864.)

     “Fears and Scruples.” ("Pacchiarotto and other Poems.” 1876.)

The religious sentiment in “SAUL” anticipates Christianity.  It begins with the expression of an exalted human tenderness, and ends in a prophetic vision of Divine Love, as manifested in Christ.  The speaker is David.  He has been sent into the presence of Saul to sing and play to him; for Saul is in the agony of that recurring spiritual conflict from which only David’s song can deliver him; and when the boy-shepherd has crept his way into the darkness of the tent, he sees the monarch with arms outstretched against its poles, dumb, sightless, and stark, like the serpent in the solitude of the forest awaiting its transformation.