And Cleon will not squander the time that might be well employed in studying the proportions of a man or in combining the moods of music--the later hours of a philosopher and a poet--on the futile creed of slaves.
Immortality and Divine love--these were the great words pronounced by Paul and by Christ.

_Cleon_ is the despairing cry of Pagan culture for the life beyond the grave which would attune to harmony the dissonances of earth, and render intelligible its mournful obscurities.

_Saul_, in the completed form of 1855, and _An Epistle of Karshish_ are, the one a prophecy, the other a divination, of the mystery of the love of God in the life and death of his Son.

The culminating moment in the effort of David by which he rouses to life the sunken soul of the King, the moment towards which all others tend, is that in which he finds in his own nature love as God's ultimate gift, and assured that in this, as in other gifts, the creature cannot surpass the Creator, he breaks forth into a prophecy of God's love made perfect in weakness: 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, for ever: a Hand like this hand Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ stand! What follows in the poem is only the awe, the solemnity of this discovery which has come not through any processes of reasoning but by a passionate interpretation of the enthusiasm of love and self-sacrifice in David's own heart; only this awe, and the seeming extension of his throbbing emotion and pent knowledge over the face of external nature, until night passes and with the dawn earth and heaven resume their wonted ways.

The case of Lazarus as studied by Karshish the Arabian physician results not in a rapturous prophecy like that of David, but in a stupendous conjecture of the heart which all the scepticism of the brain of a man of science cannot banish or reduce to insignificance.