_Saul_, which might be regarded as signally refuting this view, strikingly confirms it; the David of the first nine sections, which alone were produced in 1845, being the naive, devout child, brother of Pippa and of Theocrite; the evolution of this harping shepherd-boy into the illuminated prophet of Christ was the splendid achievement of the later years.[33] And to all this more acutely Christian work the _Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day_ (1850) served as a significant prologue.
[Footnote 33: It is, indeed, clear, as has been seen, from Browning's correspondence that a sequel of this kind was intended when the first nine sections were published.

The traditional legend of David would in any case suggest so much.

That the intention was not then executed is just the significant fact.] There can be little doubt that the devout Christian faith of his wife was principally concerned in this new direction of his poetry.

Yet we may easily overstate both the nature of her influence and its extent.
She, as little as he, was a dogmatic Christian; both refused to put on, in her phrase, "any of the liveries of the sects."[34] "The truth, as God sees it, must be something so different from these opinions about truth....

I believe in what is divine and floats at highest, in all these different theologies,--and because the really Divine draws together souls, and tends so to a unity, could pray anywhere and with all sorts of worshippers, from the Sistine chapel to Mr Fox's, those kneeling and those standing."[35] Yet she demurs, a little farther on in the same letter, to both these extremes.