esert cave. At first the individuals are clearly seen; but the
poem soon lapses into philosophizing, and winds up with theology. Still,
here is the power of reproducing the tone and sentiments of a
long-buried and forgotten epoch, as if the matters involved had
immediate interest and were vigorously mauled in all the newspapers. St.
John might have died last week, or we might be Syrian converts of the
second century, dissolved in tenderness at the thought that the Beloved
Disciple at last had gone to lay his head again upon the Master's bosom.
The poem talks as if it were trying to satisfy this mixture of memory
and curiosity.

Some of the best lines ever written by Mr. Browning are here. Take
these, for instance. Pamphylax, reporting John's last words, as the
hoary life flickered and clung, gives this:--

"A stick, once fire from end to end;
Now ashes, save the tip that holds a spark!
Yet, blow the spark, it runs back, spreads itself
A little where the fire was: thus I urge
The soul that served me, till it task once more
What ashes of my brain have kept their shape,
And these make effort on the last o' the flesh,
Trying to taste again the truth of things."

And after recalling the inspirations of Patmos:--

"But at the last, why, I seemed left alive
Like a sea-jelly weak on Patmos strand,
To tell dry sea-beach gazers how I fared
When there was mid-sea, and the mighty things.

* * *

Yet now I wake in such decrepitude
As I had slidden down and fallen afar,
Past even the presence of my former self,
Grasping the while for stay at facts which snap,
Till I am found away from my own world,
Feeling for foothold through a blank profound."

The poem entitled "Caliban upon Setebos; or, Natural Theology in the
Island," has for a motto, "Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an
one as thyself." Caliban talks to himself about "that other, whom his
dam called God." Setebos is the great First Cause as conceived and
dreaded in the heart of a Caliban. The poem is by no means a caricature
of the natural theology which springs from selfishness and fear. All the
phenomena of the world are neither

"right nor wrong in Him,
Nor kind nor cruel: He is strong and Lord.
'Am strong myself, compared to yonder crabs
That march now from the mountain to the sea;
Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first,
Lov