etters, in general.
--

Shortly after the revival of learning in Europe.

The devoted disciples of a dead grammarian are bearing his body up
a mountain-side for burial on its lofty summit, "where meteors shoot,
clouds form, lightnings are loosened, stars come and go!
Lofty designs must close in like effects: loftily lying, leave him,--
still loftier than the world suspects, living and dying".

This poem is INFORMED throughout with the poet's iterated doctrine
in regard to earth life,--to the relativity of that life.
The grammarian, in his hunger and thirst after knowledge and truth,
thought not of time. "What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes!
Man has Forever." "Oh, if we draw a circle premature,
heedless of far gain, greedy for quick returns of profit,
sure bad is our bargain!"

The poem "exhibits something of the life of the Scaligers and
the Casaubons, of many an early scholar, like Roger Bacon's friend,
Pierre de Maricourt, working at some region of knowledge,
and content to labor without fame so long as he mastered thoroughly
whatever he undertook" (`Contemporary Rev.', iv., 135).

But the grammarian was true to one side only of Browning's
philosophy of life. He disregarded the claims of the physical life,
and became "soul-hydropic with a sacred thirst". *

--
* "Every lust is a kind of hydropic distemper, and the more
we drink the more we shall thirst."--Tillotson, quoted in
`Webster'.
--

The lyrico-dramatic verse of this monologue is especially noticeable.
There is a march in it, exhibiting the spirit with which the bearers
of the corpse are conveying it up the mountain-side.

An Epistle containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician.

Karshish, the Arab physician, has been journeying in quest of knowledge
pertaining to his art, and writes to his all-sagacious master, Abib,
ostensibly about the specimens he has gathered of medicinal plants
and minerals, and the observations he has made; but his real interest,
which he endeavors to conceal by passing to matters of
greater import to him, as he would have his sage at home believe,
is in what he pronounces "a case of mania, subinduced by epilepsy".
His last letter brought his journeyings to Jericho. He is now on his
way to Jerusalem, and has reached Bethany, where he passes the night.

The case of mania which so interests him,--far more than he is
willing to admit,--is that o