Stuart Mill put it, “to Hell I will go”—­and such is the cry of Browning’s victim of Zeus.  He is aware that in his recognition of righteousness he is himself superior to the evil god who afflicts him; and as this righteousness is a moral quality, and no creation of his own consciousness but rather imposed upon it as an eternal law, he rises past Zeus to the Potency above him, after which even the undeveloped sense of a Caliban blindly felt when he discovered a Quiet above the bitter god Setebos; but the Quiet of Caliban is a negation of those evil attributes of the supreme Being, which he reflects upwards from his own gross heart, not the energy of righteousness which Ixion demands in his transcendent “Potency.”  Into this poem went the energy of Browning’s heart and imagination; some of his matured wisdom entered into Jochanan Hakkadosh, of which, however, the contents are insufficient to sustain the length.  The saint and sage of Israel has at the close of his life found no solution of the riddle of existence.  Lover, bard, soldier, statist, he has obtained in each of his careers only doubts and dissatisfaction.  Twelve months added to a long life by the generosity of his admirers, each of whom surrenders a fragment of his own life to prolong that of the saint, bring him no clearer illumination—­still all is vanity and vexation of spirit.  Only at the last, when by some unexpected chance, a final opportunity of surveying the past and anticipating the future is granted him, all has become clear.  Instead of trying to solve the riddle he accepts it.  He sees from his Pisgah how life, with all its confusions and contrarieties, is the school which educates the soul and fits it for further wayfaring.  The ultimate faith of Jochanan the Saint had been already expressed by Browning: 

    Over the ball of it,
    Peering and prying,
    How I see all of it,
    Life there, outlying! 
    Roughness and smoothness,
    Shine and defilement,
    Grace and uncouthness: 
    One reconcilement.

But even to his favourite disciple the sage is unable so to impart the secret that Tsaddik’s mind shall really embrace it.

The spirit of the saint of Israel is also the spirit of that wise Dervish of Browning’s invention (1884), the Persian Ferishtah.  The volume is frankly didactic, and Browning, as becomes a master who would make his lessons easy to children, teaches by parables and pictures.  In reading Ferishtah’s Fancies we might suppose that we were in the Interpreter’s House, and that the Interpreter himself was pointing a moral with the robin that has a spider in his mouth, or the hen walking in a fourfold method towards her chickens.  The discourses of the Dervish are in the main theological or philosophical; the lyrics, which are interposed between the discourses or discussions, are amatory.  In Persian Poetry much that at first sight might be taken for amatory has in its inner meaning a mystical theological sense.  Browning reverses the order of such poetry; he gives us first his doctrine concerning life or God, and gives it clothed in a parable; then in a lyric the subject is retracted into the sphere of human affections, and the truth of theology condenses itself into a corresponding truth respecting the love of man and woman.