supposed writer comes across Lazarus, | unparalleled change and elevation of soul, and registers his case as a curious instance which he cannot explain by any previous of suspended animation, followed by an theory: "He holds on firmly to some thread of life His heart and brain move there, his feet stay here." But at the close, after a vain attempt | tical, half-skeptical Arab returns to the to wrap himself in the details of his thought which now haunts him: earthly science once more, the half-mys "The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think? In entire harmony with this is the close of that which we have already named as Mr. Browning's greatest poem, than which we know none nobler in the whole range of English poetry. And here the genesis of the poem gives it a special interest. In "Bells and Pomegranates," in 1844, in the "Poems" of 1849, we have but Part I. of "Saul." As it was, it was a picture of wonderful beauty-the boy-minstrel, and the dark, maddened king; the song in which David sang of the joys of the hunter, and the shepherd, and the reaper, and the Levites in the Temple: "Oh, our manhood's prime vigor! no spirit feels waste, And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair. And the meal-the rich dates yellowed over with gold-dust divine, And the locust's flesh steeped in the pitcher! The full draught of wine, of human and divine possibilities that he had never before dreamt of, and his human love becomes an Apocalypse of the Everlasting Mercy: But something yet remained behind. | reäcts on his own spirit, unfolds depths The wish and thought were loftier than as yet his power of execution. That reached its consummate and perfect skill when the poem received its completion. Then the good that David has wrought "See the King-I would help him, but cannot, the wishes fall through. And thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up nor down Thy power, that exists with and for it, of being Beloved! He who did most shall bear most; the strongest shall stand the most weak. In the Godhead! I seek and I find it, O Saul, it shall be A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me Thou shalt love and be loved by forever; a Hand like this hand Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ stand!" Side by side with this noble utterance | yields to this tendency thinks of this as of the central thought of a true belief in the Mystery of the Incarnation, we find, where Mr. Browning lets us hear his own voice, his confession of faith as to the ultimate issues of the divine work of love, of which It, and the Death upon the Cross were the manifestation. It will not surprise any one to hear that he shares the widest and fullest hopes of its ultimate victory over evil. Universalism is, indeed, essentially a poet's creed, not only or chiefly because it harmonizes with the idealizing temperament which shuts its eyes to the stern realities around it, but because it falls in with the spirit which looks on the whole history of the world, and of each single soul in it, as the unfolding of a great drama, in which men and women are the puppets, and God himself at once the great poet and the one spectator. And so as he himself, if the Creator of such a world, would lead it on, in its totality and all its parts, to perfect joy and peace-the poet who the necessary issue. With Clement of Alexandria, he cannot limit the operation of the infinite mercies of divine love to the narrow space of life; with Origen, he cannot think, as long as man's freedom lasts, of the possibility of good being extinguished, and dreams of the redemptive work as extending even to the principalities and powers of spiritual evil; with Gregory of Nyssa, whose thoughts on this question went further than Origen's, he looks forward to the time when one accordant song of jubilation shall ascend from the whole universe of God.* So the two great poets of our own time proclaim a hope as far-reaching and glorious as those of the patristic theologians we have named. Mr. Tennyson welcomes his "friend," the chief representative of that hope among religious thinkers of our own time, though "thirty thousand college councils thunder anathemas" against him, and utters in "In Memoriam" his own belief: "Oh yet we trust that somehow good To pangs of nature, sins of will, "That nothing walks with aimless feet; *With Origen, who has often been reproached | could not be raised to a higher perfection than with introducing into the creed of Christians the that in which he had been created and from thought of cycles of sin, punishment, restoration, which he fell, Origen, with the logical sequence and then sin again (compare the language of of an Alexandrian thinker, could not but admit Augustine, "De Civ. Dei," xxi. 17, "Alter- the possibility of another fall, needing another nantes sine cessatione beatitudines et miserias, et period of discipline and restitution ("De Princ.," statutis sæculorum intervallis ab istis ad illas, et i. 6). In the few passages in which Gregory of ab illis ad istas itus ac reditus interminabiles"), Nyssa (Catech. viii. and xxvi.) gives utterance to the starting-point of the hope is found in his be- his hope (for the most part he uses the Church's lief in the indestructible freedom of choice in man current language of encouragement and warning), and other spiritual beings, and the power of the it rests more simply on his faith that all punishDivine Goodness. Given these conditions of the ment is, in its nature, remedial, and that the lovproblem, and he can see no limit to the extension ing purpose of God cannot ultimately be frusof the saving work. But holding that the free-trated, nor Christ fail to "see of the travail of His dom of choice would exist still, and that man soul." Or cast as rubbish to the void, "Behold, we know not anything; I can but trust that good shall fall Mr. Browning, looking, in a poem in his "Dramatis Personæ," on "Apparent Failure" as seen at the Morgue in the lifeless bodies of those who most abhorred Their life in Paris yesterday," and tracing, with his usual subtlety and "My own hope is, a sun will pierce "Rabbi Ben Ezra": "So take and use Thy work! Amend what flaws may lurk, In the poem of which we speak, obscure and oracular as are its utterances, this thought is, we think, distinctly heard, and as yet it is the poet's last word to us. We have the old faith represented by the chorus of Levites in the tem What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past ple, singing as to a Living God who has the aim! My times be in Thy hand! Let age approve of youth, and death com- chosen them as His inheritance: "When the singers lift up their voice, Whose mercy endureth for ever! One poem, the "Epilogue" to the "Dramatis Personæ," still remains as an expression of Mr. Browning's creed, and Then comes the contrast of the modit shows what we believe to be the be- ern scientific skepticism which has cast setting danger of this wider hope, its aside this faith, and Rénan is made its tendency to glide into a pantheistic theory representative. It scorns the old, and exof the universe. The education of man-ults over its disappearance: Then, lastly, a spirit speaks. What | They, too, have but glimpses of the truth, comes is given as the solution of the and lose one while they grasp at another. problem, the conclusion of the whole. The scorn of modern skeptics for the old faith is blind and unreasoning. matter. *Mr. Keble's language on this subject is, of course, within the limits of what he held to be The great ocean surges round them, and now this point and now that comes into prominence, and men think that the island-rock which is left bare is the one home of truth, when lo! the waves come and sweep it from view, and the glory and the beauty appear again elsewhere. Nature, in her infinitude, thus dances round each one of us, forms each separate personality, moulding it now after this type, and now after that: "Why, where's the need of temple, when the walls This is, indeed, but the condensed expression of the thought which dominates in what is in some respects the most complete and striking of Mr. Browning's religious poems-Christmas Eve, and Easter Day." There the opening scene is a small dissenting chapel on a bleak common, and on a wet and windy night. The congregation are painted, one by one, with all the truth and all the grotesqueness of which Mr. Browning is so great a master. We have the old woman with her umbrella, the meek apprentice with his hacking_cough, the Boanerges in the pulpit. It seems commonplace and mean enough-just what a mere artist, with a sovereign contempt for English middle-class life in general and its religious life in particular, would hold up to scorn; but the observer who speaks to us in the poem goes into the moonlight, and there he has a vision of a Form, dim, shadowy, wonderful, which he recognizes as at once Human and Divine, and that Form has been present where the two or three were gathered together, and has not turned away. The scene changes first to St. Peter's, with all its gorgeous worship and its effete symbols, and its superb unrealities, and then to the lecture-room of a German professor, unfolding to his class, with the pallor of death already on his brow, the abysses of the mythical theory of the Gospels, taking from them what has been the faith of their fathers, and offering them a dreary and hopeless substitute. And yet even here, in both these scenes, the presence of the Form is seen, and a glory falls as from the border of its raiment. The worship of Rome is not altogether false. Faith mingles with the denial of the disciple of Strauss. The man who denies a personal immortality dies a martyr to his consuming zeal for truth. The Divine Judge pardons and accepts them both. We have given but the barest outline of the first of these strangely fascinating poems. It will be seen, on the one hand, that they are inspired with a broad and true catholicity, which can see an element of truth or goodness at the most opposite extremes, and can sympathize with it under whatever disguises and with whatever accompaniments it may be found. On the other, we are compelled to add that they tend to the conclusion that all varieties of the Christian creed are equally true, equally acceptable, and so to a belief which, if it be a faith in a personal God, resembles that of some Eastern mystics who speak of the Divine Mind as delighting in the variety of creeds and worships as a man may delight in the varied colors and odors of a fair garden, and which at last glides into the pantheistic thought of a Divine Work evolving itself through the ages in all forms of human thought and life—not of a Will revealing itself through prophets and apostles, but above all in the Eternal Word. We owe too much to Mr. Browning's spirit-stirring words, and think too highly of his purpose, as well as power, as a poet, to believe that in all that he has said as to the mystery of the manifestation of the Eternal Word in the Divine humanity of Christ, he has been simply dramatic, personating a faith which he no longer holds, or has never held at all. But if we may venture to say one word before we end, not of him only, but to him, it would be to suggest that this intensely dramatic power, while it is a great and wonderful gift, brings with it a subtle and perilous temptation. It leads, as he has himself pointed out in "Sordello," to the suppression of individual, personal life where it might be most powerful: "Sundered in twain, each spectral part at strife "But the complete Sordello, Man and Bard, A bitter-sweetling of a book-was gone." The artist paints a thousand portraits, | horrors, or plunging the scalpel into the but we long to see himself. We could soul's ulcerous scabs, but upward as to almost pay the price of forfeiting Hamlet the majesty of the Throne, purifying our or Iago if so we could have had the whole hearts and attuning them to adoration? mind of Shakespeare. It is open, we be- Asking himself what he himself believes, lieve, to Mr. Browning to attain a yet and uttering the answer which we hope higher pinnacle of greatness, to exercise he is prepared to give, in no faltering a wider and nobler influence on men of voice, he may come to be the greatest strong will and robust intellect, than he Christian poet that England has yet seen has yet done. As a "fashioner," to re- in this century or in all the past, and turn to his own language, he has attained leave a name to live with those of Dante an excellence which no other living poet and of Milton. equals. Will he not realize the promise of his own words, and appear, if years are given and the old strength remains, as a "seer," telling us with clearer and stronger voice what he has indeed seen, leading us not downward to a fiery whirl of passions, or a chaos of grotesque DAUD PASHA. THE materials at our command do not warrant other than a very brief sketch of the remarkable man whose portrait embellishes the present number of THE ECLECTIC; but meagre and imperfect as it is, it will add to the interest of the picture, and awaken an interest in the man himself. We are indebted to two eminent American missionaries, who have long labored in Syria, and who know the Pasha personally, for the statements we make concerning him, as well as for two photographs of him, both taken in Constantinople, from which our engraving is produced. The likeness, as well as the statements, are therefore thoroughly trustworthy. His Excellency, Daûd Pasha, is not a Turk, but a Papal Armenian. His is the sides NOTE. I have learnt, since the publication of Part I., that two of Mr. Browning's dramas, be"Strafford," have been brought upon the stage: "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon at Drury Lane in 1842 or 1843, and "Colombe's Birthday' at the Haymarket more recently. first, and, we believe, the only instance, of a Christian being made a Pasha by the Sultan, and this fact indicates the possession of extraordinary qualities. He was in the employment of the Turkish Government in Constantinople for a considerable period before he was appointed to his present responsible position, and was then known as Daûd Effendi. After the terrible massacre of the Christians in 1860, through the intense hatred and fanatical zeal of the Turks, and which awakened the intensest interest of Christendom in their behalf; and when it was deemed by the Turkish Government indispensable to the peace of Mount Lebanon to appoint a Christian Governor, Daûd Effendi was selected as the man best qualified for the delicate |