of Cleon; and a profound discouragement has settled down upon the soul of each.  The race progresses from point to point; self-consciousness is deepened and quickened as generation succeeds generation; the sympathies of the individual are multiplied and extended.  But he that increases knowledge, increases sorrow; most progress is most failure; the soul climbs the heights only to perish there.  Every day the sense of joy grows more acute; every day the soul grows more enlarged; and every day the power to put our best attainments to use diminishes.  “And how dieth the wise man?  As the fool.  Therefore I hated life; yea, I hated all my labour that I had taken under the sun.”  The poem is, indeed, an Ecclesiastes of pagan religion.  The assurance of extinction is the worm which gnaws at the heart of the rose: 

     It is so horrible
    I dare at times imagine to my need
    Some future state revealed to us by Zeus,
    Unlimited in capability
    For joy, as this is in desire for joy.

But this is no better than a dream; Zeus could not but have revealed it, were it possible.  Browning does not bring his Cleon, as Pater brings his Marius, into the Christian catacombs, where the image of the Shepherd bearing his lamb might interpret the mystery of death, nor to that house of Cecilia where Marius sees a new joy illuminating every face.  Cleon has heard of Paulus and of Christus, but who can suppose that a mere barbarian Jew

    Hath access to a secret shut from us?

The doctrine of Christ, preached on the island by certain slaves, is reported by an intelligent listener to be one which no sane man can accept.  And Cleon will not squander the time that might be well employed in studying the proportions of a man or in combining the moods of music—­the later hours of a philosopher and a poet—­on the futile creed of slaves.

Immortality and Divine love—­these were the great words pronounced by Paul and by Christ. Cleon is the despairing cry of Pagan culture for the life beyond the grave which would attune to harmony the dissonances of earth, and render intelligible its mournful obscurities. Saul, in the completed form of 1855, and An Epistle of Karshish are, the one a prophecy, the other a divination, of the mystery of the love of God in the life and death of his Son.  The culminating moment in the effort of David by which he rouses to life the sunken soul of the King, the moment towards which all others tend, is that in which he finds in his own nature love as God’s ultimate gift, and assured that in this, as in other gifts, the creature cannot surpass the Creator, he breaks forth into a prophecy of God’s love made perfect in weakness: 

     O Saul, it shall be
    A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me
    Thou shalt love and be loved by, for ever:  a Hand like this hand
    Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee!  See the Christ stand!