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 naïve 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