Robert Browning

olden plates, his songs rising from every fishing-bark at
nightfall,--and wistfully contrasts the vast range of delights which as
an artist he imagines, with the limited pleasures which as a man he
enjoys. The magnificent symmetry, the rounded completeness of his life,
suffer a serious deduction here, and his Greek sense of harmony suffers
offence as well as his human hunger for joy. He is a thorough realist,
and finds no satisfaction in contemplating what he may not possess. Art
itself suffers disparagement, as heightening this vain capacity of
contemplation:--

"I know the joy of kingship: well, thou art king!"

With great ingenuity this Greek realism is made the stepping-stone to a
conception of immortality as un-Greek as that of the Incarnation is
un-Semitic. Karshish shrank intuitively from a conception which
fascinated while it awed; to Cleon a future state in which joy and
capability will be brought again to equality seems a most plausible
supposition, which he only rejects with a sigh for lack of outer
evidence:--

"Zeus has not yet revealed it; and alas,
He must have done so, were it possible!"

The little vignette in the opening lines finely symbolises the brilliant
Greek decadence, as does the closing picture in Karshish the mystic dawn
of the Earth. Here the portico, flooded with the glory of a sun about to
set, profusely heaped with treasures of art; there the naked uplands of
Palestine, and the moon rising over jagged hills in a wind-swept sky.

In was in such grave _adagio_ notes as these that Browning chose to set
forth the "intimations of immortality" in the meditative wisdom and
humanity of heathendom. The after-fortunes of the Christian legend, on
the other hand, and the naive ferocities and fantasticalities of the
medieval world provoked him rather to _scherzo_,--audacious and
inimitable _scherzo_, riotously grotesque on the surface, but with a
grotesqueness so penetrated and informed by passion that it becomes
sublime. _Holy-Cross Day_ and _

Reverend Nehemiah Adams (born February 19, 1806; died October 6, 1878) was an American clergyman and writer. He was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1806 to Nehemiah Adams and Mehitabel Torrey Adams. He graduated from Harvard University in 1826, and from Andover Theological Seminary in 1829. He was ordained as co-pastor of First Congregational Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that same year. In 1832, he married Martha Hooper.

Joanna Baillie (September 11, 1762February 23, 1851) was a Scottish poet and dramatist. Baillie was very well-known during her lifetime and, though a woman, intended her plays not for the closet but for the stage. Admired both for her literary powers and her sweetness of disposition, her cottage at Hampstead was the centre of a brilliant literary society. Baillie died at the age of 88, her faculties remaining unimpaired to the last.

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