be in place; but the Christmas and Easter Visions are felt as intrusive
anachronisms in modern London, where the divinest influences are not
those which become palpable in visions, but those which work through
heart and brain.

[Footnote 36: _One Word More_.]

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 spirit