previous periods.  In the early Dramatic Lyrics and Romances, and in the plays, there is exquisite rendering of religion, and also of irreligion; but the religion is just the simple faith of Pippa or of Theocrite that “God’s in his world”; and the irreligion is the Humanist paganism of St Praxed’s, not so much hostile to Christianity as unconscious of it.  No single poem written before 1850 shows that acute interest in the problems of Christian faith which constantly emerges in the work of this and the following years. Saul, which might be regarded as signally refuting this view, strikingly confirms it; the David of the first nine sections, which alone were produced in 1845, being the naive, devout child, brother of Pippa and of Theocrite; the evolution of this harping shepherd-boy into the illuminated prophet of Christ was the splendid achievement of the later years.[33] And to all this more acutely Christian work the Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850) served as a significant prologue.

[Footnote 33:  It is, indeed, clear, as has been seen, from Browning’s correspondence that a sequel of this kind was intended when the first nine sections were published.  The traditional legend of David would in any case suggest so much.  That the intention was not then executed is just the significant fact.]

There can be little doubt that the devout Christian faith of his wife was principally concerned in this new direction of his poetry.  Yet we may easily overstate both the nature of her influence and its extent.  She, as little as he, was a dogmatic Christian; both refused to put on, in her phrase, “any of the liveries of the sects."[34] “The truth, as God sees it, must be something so different from these opinions about truth....  I believe in what is divine and floats at highest, in all these different theologies,—­and because the really Divine draws together souls, and tends so to a unity, could pray anywhere and with all sorts of worshippers, from the Sistine chapel to Mr Fox’s, those kneeling and those standing."[35] Yet she demurs, a little farther on in the same letter, to both these extremes.  “The Unitarians seem to me to throw over what is most beautiful in the Christian Doctrine; but the Formulists, on the other side, stir up a dust, in which it appears excusable not to see.”  To which he replies (Aug. 17):  “Dearest, I know your very meaning, in what you said of religion, and responded to it with my whole soul—­what you express now is for us both, ... those are my own feelings, my convictions beside—­instinct confirmed by reason.”

[Footnote 34:  E.B.B. to R.B., 15th Aug. 1846.]

[Footnote 35:  Ib.]