Browning probably felt this, for the Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day stands in this respect alone in his work.  But the idea of Christ as the sign and symbol of the love which penetrates the universe lost none of its hold upon his imagination; and it inspired some of the greatest achievements of the Men and Women.  It was under this impulse that he now, at some time during the early Italian years, completed the splendid torso of Saul.  David’s Vision of the Christ that is to be has as little apparent relation to the quiet pastoralism of the earlier stanzas as the Easter Vision to the common-sense reflections that preceded it.  But while this Vision abruptly bursts upon him, David’s is the final conquest of his own ardent intellect, under the impulse of a great human task which lifts it beyond its experience, and calls out all its powers.  David is occupied with no speculative question, but with the practical problem of saving a ruined soul; and neither logical ingenuity nor divine suggestion, but the inherent spiritual significance of the situation, urges his thought along the lonely path of prophecy.  The love for the old king, which prompts him to try all the hidden paths of his soul in quest of healing, becomes a lighted torch by which he tracks out the meaning of the world and the still unrevealed purposes of God; until the energy of thought culminates in vision, and the Christ stands full before his eyes.  All that is supernatural in the Saul is viewed through the fervid atmosphere of David’s soul.  The magic of the wonderful Nocturne at the close, where he feels his way home through the appalled and serried gloom, is broken by no apparition; the whole earth is alive and awake around him, and thrills to the quickening inrush of the “new land”; but its light is the tingling emotion of the stars, and its voice the cry of the little brooks; and the thronging cohorts of angels and powers are unuttered and unseen.

Only less beautiful than Browning’s pictures of spiritual childhood are his pictures of spiritual maturity and old age.  The lyric simplicity, the naive intensity which bear a David, a Pippa, a Pompilia without effort into the region of the highest spiritual vision, appealed less fully to his imagination than the more complex and embarrassed processes through which riper minds forge their way towards the completed insight of a Rabbi ben Ezra.  In this sense, the great song of David has a counterpart in the subtle dramatic study of the Arab physician Karshish.  He also is startled into discovery by a unique experience.  But where David is lifted on and on by a continuous tide of illuminating thought, perfectly new and strange, but to which nothing in him opposes the semblance of resistance, Karshish feels only a mysterious attraction, which he hardly confesses, and which all the intellectual habits and convictions of a life given up to study and thought seem to gainsay.  No touch of worldly motive belongs to either.  The shepherd-boy is