The Gipsy's lay of far-off romance awakens the young duchess; Theocrite's "little human praise" wins God's ear, and Pippa's songs transform the hearts of men.

A poet in this vein would fall naturally enough upon the Biblical story of the cure of the stricken Saul by the songs of the boy David.

But a special influence drew Browning to this subject,--the wonderful _Song to David_ of Christopher Smart,--"a person of importance in his day," who owes it chiefly to Browning's enthusiastic advocacy of a poem he was never weary of declaiming, that he is a poet of importance in ours.

Smart's David is before all things the glowing singer of the Joy of Earth,--the glory of the visible creation uttering itself in rapturous Praise of the Lord.
And it is this David of whom we have a presentiment in the no less glowing songs with which Browning's shepherd-boy seeks to reach the darkened mind of Saul.
Of the poem we now possess, only the first nine sections belong to the present phase of Browning's work.

These were confessedly incomplete, but Browning was content to let them go forth as they were, and less bent upon even their ultimate completion, it would seem, than Miss Barrett, who bade him "remember" that the poem was "there only as a first part, and that the next parts must certainly follow and complete what will be a great lyrical work--now remember."[24] And the "next parts" when they came, in _Men and Women_, bore the mark of his ten years' fellowship with her devout and ecstatic soul, as well as of his own growth towards the richer and fuller harmonies of verse.