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! S