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."

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