beginning; and the highest animal we know of is incapable of it.  We know that the men of the caves were capable of it.  When they made a drawing, a piece of carving, they were unsatisfied until they had made a better.  When they made a story out of what they knew and saw, they went on to make more.  Creation, invention, art—­this, independent entirely of the religious desire, makes the infinite gulf which divides man from the highest animals.

I do not mean, in this book, to speak of the theology of Caliban, though the part of the poem which concerns the origin of sacrifice is well worth our attention.  But the poem may be recommended to those theological persons who say there is no God; and to that large class of professional theologians, whose idea of a capricious, jealous, suddenly-angered God, without any conscience except his sense of power to do as he pleases, is quite in harmony with Caliban’s idea of Setebos.

The next of these “imaginative representations” is the poem called Cleon.  Cleon is a rich and famous artist of the Grecian isles, alive while St. Paul was still making his missionary journeys, just at the time when the Graeco-Roman culture had attained a height of refinement, but had lost originating power; when it thought it had mastered all the means for a perfect life, but was, in reality, trembling in a deep dissatisfaction on the edge of its first descent into exhaustion.  Then, as everything good had been done in the art of the past, cultivated men began to ask “Was there anything worth doing?” “Was life itself worth living?”; questions never asked by those who are living.  Or “What is life in its perfection, and when shall we have it?”; a question also not asked by those who live in the morning of a new aera, when the world—­as in Elizabeth’s days, as in 1789, as perhaps it may be in a few years—­is born afresh; but which is asked continually in the years when a great movement of life has passed its culminating point and has begun to decline.  Again and again the world has heard these questions; in Cleon’s time, and when the Renaissance had spent its force, and at the end of the reign of Louis XIV., and before Elizabeth’s reign had closed, and about 1820 in England, and of late years also in our society.  This is the temper and the time that Browning embodies in Cleon, who is the incarnation of a culture which is already feeling that life is going out of it.

Protus, the king, has written to him, and the poem is Cleon’s answer to the king.  Browning takes care, as usual, to have his background of scenery quite clear and fair.  It is a courtyard to Cleon’s house in one of the sprinkled isles—­

    Lily on lily, that o’erlace the sea,
    And laugh their pride when the light wave lisps “Greece.”

I quote it; it marks the man and the age of luxurious culture.