ee'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.

David tells his story, re-enacting the scene which it describes, in
strong, simple, picturesque words which rise naturally into the language
of prophecy. He tells how first he tried the influence of pastoral
tunes: those which call the sheep back to the pen, and stir the sense of
insect and bird; how he passed to the song of the reapers--their
challenge t